Recently Jerbot has updates his site - aoestats.io which shows us the stats by elo, map, teamgame/1vs1 (only RM), patch and game time of every Civilization’s win rate, play rate and game length.
The most shocking update I found was Burmese fell from no 1 position in team games to number 27!!
Was it the recent tweak to their Arambai? Was it because Burmese were not picked by pros in HC4? What do you think? Let’s discuss!
The double castle Arambai strat was pretty sick on Arena. Now they don’t take out TCs that fast. This also means in large teamgames it’s harder to sneak into an enemy base and quickly take out a TC + Vills before the opponent sends reinforcements.
Their champions are still amazing though…
Yes.
Arambai was an all-in that got way, way too much value, and players who were well below the average Elo that learned even a remotely passable 2 castle build could very reasonably pose a death threat to an opponent as soon as it got going because they could kill buildings.
The reduction to damage (flat) makes it so they don’t readily overpower the innate pierce armor of most buildings anymore, and to compensate that, their “misses” hit for full damage. Generally, they got worse in any scenario that wasn’t mass on mass, and in mass on mass it’s a wash at best.
Given how that was the one viable strat for a Burmese in TG’s (their archers are poor, their cavalry is lackluster in a gold-heavy environment, and their siege is nothing special) and you should expect a massive drop.
Burmese need a military buff, urgently. Broken arambai was the only thing that made the civ “viable”. Other than that, they specialize in infantry, monks and elephants… The 3 most lackluster units
But from how I used them, I feel like arambais are buffed vs military, especially when overkill happens a lot.
It’s a wash at best, for sure. They might do better against archers, but they perform far worse against Cavalry after the change. Cav used to melt to Arambai because once you got close the Arambai was relatively accurate, and the high damage meant even relatively small numbers of arambai could pick off knights with micro. They hit the damage hard and now you need a lot more of them to achieve the same effect.
Against siege, it’s a similar story, since you’d want to just dodge and split-micro until you get close, then snipe the siege. Now the damage is much much lower, so it takes way more shots to kill than it used to (it literally used to take just four or five hits from Arambai connecting to kill any non-ram siege, now it takes ten or fifteen) and missing is missing whether the miss would do full damage or not on a stray hit when you’re trying to hit a single mangonel or scorpion.
So against siege or cavalry it performs markedly worse, especially in small numbers. Combine that with the drastic reduction in building damage and it’s a totally changed unit.
I feel like people are playing them wrong though. Castle Age Arambai became weaker, massed Elite-Arambai became (I’m even tempted to say “a lot”) stronger. Yet people are playing as if there was no change, going for 2 Castle Arambai in Castle Age.
I think playing a normal Castle Age with Knights (which Burmese can do perfectly fine) and then switching to Arambai when going Imp (or even later) would be a lot more promising.
He should update to show per age as well
You have to extrapolate that by seeing their win rate wrt game time.
If they got a lot stronger that still wouldn’t make them good in the general sense. They’re too expensive to mass as part of a composition (and needing to make them from a castle is a hurdle to add), massed arambai when not a part of a composition gets murdered by skirms and archer units in general, extremely cost-efficiently.
If you don’t mass them up, they don’t get to really make up for their terrible accuracy with a large field of fire, and they’re simply lackluster. That was the case before the changes, and it’s going to remain the case now.
They fell 20 spots and 4% in 1v1 too. The change was a nerf not a wash.
I haven’t said anything to the contrary once you read the context.
The civ needs some way to deal with Archers. You can’t even make Skirms as Burmese because they miss out on so much armor from the blacksmith… if the devs just want to restrict the civ from investing into the archer line, just make crossbowman unavailable, and it’ll surely do the trick…
They are amazing, how are they lackluster?
infantry are largely a support unit designed around countering other units.
monks are good in castle age but fall off as armies get larger.
elephants are slow and expensive.
You are pretending like the only infantry unit is the Halberdier.
They are useful if you keep them in the back of your army and protect them as they can do a bit of healing and converting.
And they absolutely wreck every melee unit except for the pikemen.
practically possible with teutons only
most units just run away from them, so they are only good as an offensive unit, not a defensive one
So basically they are the complete opposite of Camels
Healing is always appreciated even if it is just a little bit of it.
I know and it is quite underrated. But keeping monks safe when healing around is only practically possible with Teutons. and tbh it fits their playstyle with heavy population efficient slow units.
no i’m not. the militia line is good for countering trash and eagles, but not much else. thats all the infantry burmese has.
which doesn’t matter as much when you’re talking about army sizes of 60+ units.
if they can get to them, but go look at how many workers you need to sustain elephant production. also monks will have an absolute field day with them.
the problem is the healing rate is too slow for it to be actually effective.