The Change Organ Guns Need?

Age of Empires III: DE III - Discussion
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Organ Guns

I’m a Portuguese main. I’ve long been a fan of Organ Guns since they paired so well with one of my favorite units; the Portuguese Dragoon. Organ Guns kill skirms and pikes to protect my Dragoons.

Naturally, I very much enjoyed the addition of Grape Shot (IV) and the Infinite 3 OGs (IV). My Organ Guns were better than before, and at the time I think a lot of people considered OGs to be a bit too weak.

Later, Grape Shot got the famous, or infamous, change of increased speed. Originally, this buff was balanced out by an obnoxious bug that caused OGs to freeze up if you told them to walk too far. Later that was fixed.

The increased mobility felt amazing. People have long complained about Portugal not having “fun” units, and I think this was a major step towards both addressing that complaint while also improving an under appreciated unit.

Shortly after the bug was fixed I got into an argument with @M00Z1LLA over its balance. Since then I’ve started to evolve my thinking on a few things regarding the balance of Grape Shot. At that time, I think it was clear that they were a bit overtuned, but with how ridiculous a few other things were (and unfortunately kinda still are…) I found myself somewhat in the “cry me a river” camp. I hadn’t run into too many good players using them, and my own control of them wasn’t as strong as it is now.

As I’ve gained substantially more experience with them, it has become clear to me that they are too good now. @M00Z1LLA, you were right, they are a major balance issue.

Now the question becomes; what to do about it?

While I usually find myself in the “revert it” camp, but I don’t want to see that here. The mobility is extremely fun and does a lot for the civ. I’ve suggested adjusting their stats when GS comes in, but now I don’t think that’s a good idea either. I’ve also suggested stat changes in a couple threads, but I don’t believe they received sufficient analysis. So I’m going to suggest them again here, in their own thread.

The basic idea is to fix a few things;
**1, slightly improve the age 3 siege that Portugal gets. **
**2, make the mobility a default feature. **
**3, re-specialize them against infantry. **

Organ Gun:
Cost 300c, 100w.
HP: 150, 75% RR.
Speed 4 (unit will only have blast mode)

17 siege damage (6x), 2x vs Infantry, 1.7x vs Buildings, 1x vs ships [called out because this is a change to keep roughly the current damage], 0.6x vs Artillery, 0.4x vs Cavalry and Shock Infantry, etc… 2 AoE, 4 RoF.
[approximately -40% damage vs artillery and -60% damage vs cavalry]

Grape Shot (IV)
Organ Guns gain +1 AoE and now deal an extra 15% damage to infantry.

The effect of the change would be a substantial reduction in damage to Artillery and cavalry. Meanwhile, they get the mobility earlier and slightly better damage vs Infantry and buildings.

Grape shot is more specialized, for greater impact vs infantry and it’ll no longer improve RoF. The reason for the RoF reversion is because it made it harder to time cavalry charges to avoid too much artillery fire.

Since all of this is currently around now, it should be a fairly simple change for the devs to make.

I’d like to know what people think. Is this a good suggestion?

1 Like
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I have exactly the same thoughts about this.

I main with Portugal, loved the addition of the age IV card, it started to get abused (even by myself in most games), and now it’s totally overused by Portugal players.

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The one thing that made sure to nerf their strength a bit was eliminating the “target lock” feature (if the organ gun aimed at something, but the unit got out of range, it had to restart the animation).

That alone made a good bit of nerfin’ to the age IV card, but still I see Portugal players racing to the fourth age just to spam them cannons, sort of like USA does with the gatlings. It’s easier with Ports as they have extra TCs to age and defend…

I don’t think the upgrade should go away or be changed, and eliminating the area of effect + rate of fire wouldn’t do much, but 1 other way to nerf them would be to add a cost to the upgrade, that way, players get punished for skipping age II and III just to send that OP card, taking extra time to obtain it.

If after adding a cost to the card, the opponent doesn’t have a proper response with the extra time, they were just too slow or bad at siege to keep up…

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make it pop increased and cosy increased after the card sent. just like the chinese Old Dynasty Reform. it is easy to manipulate the number there.
favor-wish, it should be more costly for a nee ammo?

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I was making that call early because it’s exactly the same problem that Gatling Guns used to have and those had their cavalry damage nerfed into the ground. Organ Guns now have about the same stats as old gats but with +2 range so it was very obviously going to be the problem.

I think Grapeshot is the primary thing making them problematic. The improvements it grants have absolutely nothing to do with what grapeshot actually is (other than the AoE) and just make it fire continuously when massed.

Grapeshot should have never affected the packing animation or fire rate because that doesn’t leave any gap for cavalry to close on them. What it should do is increase AoE for all cannons (except maybe culvs) because that’s what Grapeshot actually does. For OG specifically it could improve their anti infantry multiplier too. On top of that, OG could have their cav multi reduced a bit to ~0.4 or be made more specialized against infantry as you say. The numbers you suggest seem a little excessive, but if that’s going along with increased base speed then maybe it’s fine.

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My hope was to make the speed a core feature of the unit, so yes, I went kinda hard on the damage vs cav and artillery.