The Cavalry Archers

Age of Empires II: DE II - Discussion
42

Okay

it doesn’t, CA doesn’t fight crossbow because CA can choose when to fight and simply only pick optimal fights

tournaments are played with civ draft, often meaning no mirrors. as for the meta, huns as a whole has become weaker by comparison, not the CA. They used to be S tier by themselves, now they’re A tier with just about everyone worth a damn.

uh. Seriously? he had the archer techs already, he has the discount on the CA because he’s the huns and the resources on the south side of the base were range-able? Do you want me to explain everything that happened in the game to help you get inside a player’s head?

statistically speaking, they aren’t. They have an about average winrate against the top CA civs. If they did, however.

obviously having good knights is not a downside. the problem clearly has to do with the lack of, and expense of, their other tools to handle problems. any CA civ needing to push the franks can blend in halbs and every answer a frank would have for Halbs requires gold.

Taxe, Hc, and either siege option is a gold investment which is hard to fund while also pumping paladins. and to be Frank, if you aren’t into your Paladins against a CA army you’re just screwed frankly, therefore a CA civ can win by denying your opponent a chance to reach them. This is not a refutation of their paladins, it’s a great example of CA’s very polarizing strengths and an expose of the weakness of the frank tech tree.

I’m happy we’re clearing this up now so I can not do this again. Imagine trying to have a cordial discussion with someone who immediately goes ad hominem when he dislikes what bad man say.

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43

So tell me, what do you make vs them? villagers?

Because Cavalry Archers are sh.t, on voobly Cavalry Archers were the meta.

You said the Knights counter CA, that means it was a stupid choose by LaaaaaN to make CA.

Go watch mbl’s last match of his last stream

Okay, this discussion doesn’t include Imperial Age. Franks are just terrible vs CA in Castle Age.

44

You asked

not

which is why your followup question makes no sense with my answer. I assume this is the question you meant to ask, so: They don’t have to. If you are pushing the base of the player with the CA, they’ll cut off your reinforcements and either mass knights, drop defensive siege, or a castle.

As long as you are forward, you can’t reinforce your army since the CA will kill anything you send forward. Since your numbers won’t grow and the CA’s will, he’ll eventually have enough to just kill your army outright. If you want to avoid this absolute certainty you must retreat and defend your production from CA who are camping it to kill the rallies. I’ve been on this before, hopefully we won’t be over this again. so to answer your question:

practically anything. Knights, siege, more CA, turtle and expand while letting your CA delay, once you have the CA the world is your oyster. It’s not like the crossbow/skirm army is going to take a TC.

no, the hun meta is gone because huns are no longer the auto pick civ. They aren’t a god tier civ anymore. If they were still the best civ in the game there would still be nonstop arabia hun wars. and those hun wars would inevitably involve plenty of CA spam.

see, here’s that part where you start talking nonsense and I have to explain everything. Go ahead and read absolutely anything I’ve said in the thread about this subject. go ahead. You will find that I have not, even once, stated that knights counter CA. Because that’s not the case, and that’s not why you make knights.

You make knights because if you don’t, you give up map control. If you don’t have a mobile unit capable of keeping pace with the CA, you can’t force it into fights or force it back to take map control. You can only keep it away from whatever location you want to control with your less mobile army. That also gives the player with the more mobile army the momentum advantage, they can raid wherever they want, whenever they want.

That means the non-CA player probably drops a more defensive castle (see G1 of Champions league where Liereyy needed to drop his first castle on his gold to secure it) to prevent raids in crucial areas. That means the CA player gets his expansions and can control the neutral resources uncontested, and has a better eco. it all follows the less mobile army.

this isn’t a discussion of what unit counters what. it’s a discussion of “if you can’t fight it, you can’t beat it, no matter what the numbers say” and knights are the only generic option that can reasonably keep up with the CA and not get utterly shredded by them.

Speaking on principle for a moment, you also want to avoid skims because they get utterly abused by any cavalry or any siege, so if you make a lot of skirms to hold off CA you can really get punished for it with, in many cases, very little investment.

45

Oops, I’m still sleepy. I meant Crossbow kill CA.

No you don’t mass Knights vs CA, because they counter Knights. With Hit and Run they can’t reach them. The only counter vs CA are Scorpions, Crossbow and Skirmisher

They are not an autopick civ anymore because CAs were nerfed. The top3 civs in AoC were the Huns, Aztecs and Koreans. Koreans lost their tower rush, CAs got nerfed hard in DE, Aztecs have been nerfed lots of times.

So you go Knights because you can easily lose them to Cavalry Archers. Knights are countered by CA no matter what you are trying to explain. Cavalry Archers are counter Knights similarly to Knights/Crossbows counter Longswords. You still ignore the part: What does full CA do vs full Crossbow, full walled, fwd siege workshop?

KOTD3: BO11 Finals, no one used Cavalry Archers on a map that definitely suits agressive play, but according to your logic they have no real counters(Scorpions??) expect defensive Castle

46

Doesn’t that fact that they weren’t used despite beeing viable (Viper vs Lierrey proved that, you cant argue about this one) just show how great the balance of the game is? There are SO MANY options, you can go for CA but you dont have to!

47

True, but this guy says that CA has no counters.

48

I mean, we’re arguing in circles, I’m going to bed after this, but to answer your question, “What does this unit do against a player who got everything he wanted in life” you do exactly what every player has since the beginning of time. You cut off the reinforcements, and make them defend the production. In this case, you can control the workshop, since it’s going to be exposed. If you want the mangonels to survive, you’ll need to keep your army nearby.

That time can be used to drop your own workshop, a castle on the front, or to raid. Just because your opponent has walled up doesn’t mean they don’t have vills in range of CA from the walls. Especially just forcing a TC to garrison constantly is good economic damage.

Out of how many civs that would reasonably make them? I count one, the Magyars. You want to complain about the fact that Khmer didn’t go cav archer?

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49

And for the record, I’ve made it clear that all the direct counters cannot engage it, which is factually correct. Just because it can’t fight it doesn’t mean it doesn’t technically counter it, it just means it doesn’t counter it in practice.

The number one thing I needed to make clear about this is that the people pushing for changes to CA want frame delay reduction. This is a horrifying proposal. One of the very few things that really hold back CA is siege, and increasing the micro power of the CA is a siege bloodbath. I’m going to sleep.

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50

I dont actually get what any of you are saying anymore, cause your discussion got so heated. You seem to think he says CA or OP, while he seems to think you say CA are completly useless.

Thats why imho you should never discuss by going phrase by phrase and rather try to resond to the overall statement…

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51

Crossbows are not War Elephants, they are super easy to mass you can easily have +20 numbers after reaching Castle Age and you can make a SW right away.

So how do you cut off his reinforcements if he doesn’t have his gather point next to his SW? At this point the the Crossbow player has 3 TCs working outside of the base that protect the woodlines. If you want to mine stone for a Castle as CA player you will be behind +20 villagers.

They would’ve used CA if they thought that it would be a good strategy. Before the draft:"Cavalry Archers are so strong. I think I should pick Huns. Or I should make Vietnamese/Japanese CA to surprise my enemy. Oh, this didn’t happen.

52

Frame delay for cav archers has to be high.
UU cav archers need their frame delay increased.
otherwise we have Micro-Nerds kitting the whole map like this is somekind of arcade game

53

If everything is connected to “Nerds” in the game then we should nerf everything, this is not a good reason or argument since game’s “Nerds” are good with every unit and with every civ. Tatoh has an account called “Feudal voy”, which he only play in feudal age, he was in top 50 by only playing in feudal age

54

Yeah, i put Viper on top easily

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55

If everything is connected to “Noobs” in the game then we should buff everything, this is not a good reason or argument since game’s “Noobs” are bad with every unit and with every civ.

Edit: tldr, why should we not watch pro players to balance the game? They are the ones playing in an optimezed way, not us.

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56

I think the reason, why they not buff CA for this patch is behind the nerf of Kipchaks. It seems many pros complains about the zero frame delay and now they make Kipchaks trash. Even if pros complains also complains about the frame delay of CA, because of the buff of Tatars they will wait to see what happens with Tatars. Also Turks receive a buff and have the potential. CA are really scary if you let your opponent time to mass. Tatars CA are great at hide out and Arena.

57

When 99% of the game players are between 1000-1900 elo this will not make them all Noobs, nerds mean more than 2000 elo or even only on top 100, so your definition of “Noobs” is sick, and even in Noobs levels the player can know if this is broken or not it is not something monopolized at some level

58

Lmao they are not trash now and they were strong af before the nerf.

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59

They did a big mistake by making the frame delay of Kipchaks like the Mangudai, the Mangudai is way more powerful than Kipchaks, actually Kipchak is the weakest CA in the game, SOTL have a youtube video about that

60

No, noobs doesn’t know what is broken because noobs can’t even execute properly a scout rush.
This game is played almost exclusively by noobs and that’s not a problem, but they are not the sticking measure for what should be nerfed or buffed.
High level aoe2 starts around 2k elo and really high level around 2k2. That’s what we should look at, not what bad to decent players think.

This proves my point further. SOTL is not a good source to learn how things go in a proper aoe2 match and no, his tests generally do not prove anything except which units are good to patrol with. Kipchaks were hella strong, the zero frame delay was broken and you could do wonders with them thanks to their cost, to how easily they were microed and to their dps. And no, they are not trash now, ask any arena clown what he thinks about a feudal boom into kipchaks 11

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61

When i mentioned SOTL i was not talking about him but about what he did and that was clear and this proves my point too about how you are sick and blind and can’t see farther from your nose