The REAL answer to the Infantry Problem

Age of Empires II: DE II - Discussion
1

Infantry have a problem that seems complex, but is actually simple, and I’ll explain why.

Note: Infantry are already powerful at low ELOs. Any changes to Infantry can’t be simple statistical buffs, as that will have be overpowered at lower ELOs. Note Hera’s reply here:

image
image1477×140 15.2 KB

Before we solve the problem, we must identify the problem. Here’s the Infantry state, by age:

Dark Age: Fine. Militia are weak but can cause misplays and throw off your enemy. State: GOOD.
Early Feudal Age: Fine. MAA rushes are a classic strategy that still work 100% fine. State: GOOD.
Ultra-Late Imperial Age: Fine. Champions are cheap and highly effective vs trash. They take some time to upgrade, but once you have those upgrades, they can do good work. State: GOOD.

The problems are from middle Feudal Age to middle Imperial Age. Let’s explore why.

Middle Feudal Age. You’ve done a MAA rush, done some damage, but you haven’t managed to finish them off. Your enemy makes a few archers. Archers move at 0.96 speed, vs 0.9 speed for MAA, so they can literally chase you all the way across the map, or micro away effortlessly. Most people suicide their MAA at this point, because keeping them alive is too much trouble. Sometimes they are used in tandem with other units, but either way, you do not make more MAA at this stage.

Early Castle Age: You hit early castle age, but because you stopped MAA production, you have no infantry. Your enemy starts making Knights. One stable can produce 4.5 resources worth of knights per second. One Barracks can produce 3.1 resources worth of Longswords per second. AND, you need Squires, Gambesons, and Supplies, slowing you down further. In practice, to keep up with 2 stable production, you need FOUR barracks. This is way too much to do, for a unit that only trades evenly with knights at best.

Early Imperial Age: You are now going into unique units, cavaliers, and gunpowder. If there is EVER a place not to use infantry, this is it. That’s fine, this would be a perfectly valid place for infantry to temporarily peter out, as there’s still the cheap 2HS upgrade you can grab if you want. But nobody does that because you don’t have any infantry to bother upgrading.

Late Imperial Age: Now you are in late imperial. Only problem, you’ve never bothered to get any infantry upgrades. If you want to use champions, you’ll need to do the COMPLETE upgrade path, which is exorbitantly expensive and time consuming. You’re almost certainly better off sticking with what you’ve already got and trying to outplay your enemy.

All of this flows naturally from that very first problem; your MAA getting chased down and killed in mid-feudal age.

IF your infantry could survive mid-feudal, then you could justify adding a few more as an early anti-building option. MAA are much more efficient vs buildings than scouts, and the damage they do, even though it can be repaired away, takes away vital villager time and consumes resources. You might end up going into castle age with 6 MAA instead of zero.

With 6 MAA, you’ve got a 2 minute headstart on knight production. You can grab the longsword upgrade right away, and now your enemy is forced to play conservatively rather than charging right in and taking big fights. Since you already have longswords on the field and they’re winning, you can justify adding some more, which makes Supplies viable(takes at least 5 more to be worth it from a food perspective).

With ~12 Longswords, you can now justify getting other infantry techs like Arson. Longswords are now a valid alternative to Siege, offering a balance of offense and defense. You can keep investing, or transition to something else.

When you hit imperial age, you’ve now got a decent pool of upgrades, making the transition into 2hs and champions far more tolerable.

ALL of this can be achieved JUST by moving Squires to the Feudal Age. Squires makes infantry able to outrun archers. Not enough to catch them; with micro, infantry will still lose that fight. But it does allow them to run away, escape their LOS, and re-engage from a different direction, forcing a more defensive posture and distracting the enemy repeatedly. A handful of MAA could be a constant distraction throughout Feudal Age, and gradually blow up into a serious problem by castle age and beyond.

The best part? Because Squires is a tech that needs to be researched, it becomes a skillful tactical decision when to get it. At lower ELOs, just grabbing it instantly will likely actually SLOW DOWN infantry tactics, so the main place this will have a positive impact is at higher ELOs.

So it solves the problem WITHOUT making things more broken where they’re already strong.

Problem solved?

12 Likes
2

Another thing I’d like to point out; Infantry could solve the current problem with some hyper-fast unique unit rushes.

That sort of tactic SHOULD be very vulnerable to early aggression, but because MAA is not viable to the point of being suicidal at that stage, and because repairing villagers can hold off virtually any other strategy, there’s basically no counter other than to fast castle yourself.

By moving Squires to Feudal, players can instantly transition their MAA rush into serious MAA pressure, which would massively slow down the hyper-fast castle age strategy, to the point of disabling it completely. The enemy will be FORCED to counter those MAA - which is the whole point.

4 Likes
3

Something thst could be “explored” could be make MAA upgrade free once you reach feudal age. In resume, bulgarian bonus for all civs, but just for MAA.
Bulgarians still would have free Longsword and THS upgradres.

4

Hera also said that m@a can easily get harassed by skirm and spears in other video. So squires helps against skirm and archers. But squires also affect spears.

5

Some new technologies for infantry that I want to introduce and I shared at the forum a while ago.
I use Military Drums instead of moving Squires. The concept is close, although I ended up making Champions even 10% faster with the change of Squires.

6

I don’t think MAA really need to be free, they are researched plenty already. LS being free, however, could be nice.

Spears vs MAA is a pretty niche situation, I don’t think it would have a major impact.

Research time is broadly fine, the big problem is that those techs are delayed too much. In practice, infantry are quite well balanced at most stages of the game, it’s just that lacking an existing mass you have to build up from nothing, which takes 4+ barracks.

Which is exactly that Feudal Squires fixes. It eliminates the need to have so many barracks early in the game, facilitates getting all the techs on time, and makes infantry use far more likely at every stage of the game.

2 Likes
7

It makes m@a to require more units to be effective.

I think Longswords timing should be earlier than xbow timing. I even think that the research timing can be instantly finished and 2HS upgrade available in castle age. Champion upgrade becomes cheaper.

1 Like
8

The Military Drums in the Feudal is not much different from moving the Squires into the Feudal. I don’t get the delay you pointed out.

The another reason I prefer to keep the Squires in the Castle Age is that this term is about knights. It is good to be in the as same Age as Knights. Therefore I add the Military Drums, something works for many cultures, to improve the infantry speed in the Feudal, and make the Squires only for the Militia line speed in the Castle Age.

1 Like
9

We already discussed topics like this in the past. Moving Squires to Feudal Age, or splitting it like they did with Devotion and Faith, could help the survival of m@a in late feudal, but it won’t solve the infantry issue at all. Otherwise, Celts would be fine with infantry, but I don’t often see this often: even with Celts, the M@A are used only as opening, leaving the main core of the feudal army to archers. Same for all the supposed “infantry civilizations” like Malians, Malay, Romans and even Goths.

I’m not saying that Squires in Feudal would not be useful, but that I think we’ll need something more to get the REAL answer to the Infantry Problem.

Any Militia-line strategy needs to go all-in in order to work. You now need 3-4 Barrack to keep up with 1-2 Stables’ Knights production.
And it’s more food-demanding than Knights:

2 stables knight production needs 12 farmers and 14 miners (26 vills)
3 barracks production with supplies needs 20 farmers and 8 miners (28 vills) and would not keep up for much time
4 barracks production needs 26 farmers and 11 miners (37 vills), and could keep up

What does this mean?
Knight player could make army while producing from 1-2 TCs and boosting his economy.
Infantry player could not do that, since he needs wood for the Barracks, and food for the army.

Don’t make me talk about the archery option, it would be even less fair on these terms.

So, I think we should consider even a little change in the resource cost of the Militia Line, shifting some of the food to the gold could be a solution to make it sustainable.

9 Likes
10

Nope. We jsut had Speed given for FREE to Eles. Didn’t solved nothing at all.

And then you just trikle down a Castle Age tech to Feudal. Nobody will research it. Cause at this stage every little bit of cost is crucial and you much more want to have the numbers. In addition you even need to resarch MAA and Supplies to the already necessary Blacksmith armor for Infantry…
This is the main Issue for Infantry at this stages anyways. And Hera also explained that. It’s just too costly.

The Speed, whilst nice isn’t enough to allow the militia lines to fair good against Archers. Maybe Skirms, given. But Skirms aren’t really the biggest issue for the militia line WHEN you got the numbers. Atm it’s just that the tech switch is so costly that you don’t get the early number against skirms you want - and it’s also then an easy switch to archers for the opponent, especially when you need to research all these mentioned techs.

One idea I already postet a lot, is to heavily reduce the tech cost for Infantry. Make them the easiest units to tech into, instead the most expensive at the early stages. MAA upgrade is balanced, but everything else can be made either built-in or super cheap and fast, so it’s an easy transition and/or powerspike.
This would be the easiest solution for the line in my eyes. Tere needs nothing to be changed on the individual level (though I would actually remove Gambesons, it didn’t work). Just make it super easy to tech into them and they will be fine, used frequently. And it would almost not affect lower levels where tech costs and timings actually aren’t that important.

One little tweak that could be made also is to replace Supplies with a tech that instead increases the Health of the militia line similar to Bloodlines (but maybe only like 10-15 HP max). This would make it way more attractive to switch into the line if you haven’t planned for it from the beginning,

3 Likes
11

Counterpoints:
I don’t think Celt infantries (very similar to FREE squire) are good enough - squire at feudal age probably can make some MAA / spear viable (esp. those with range armor), but does not seem to solve the issue in general case

5 Likes
12

Whilst vice versa we see on the most Infantry UUs and also some of the civs that make a lot of militia:
Reducing the tech-in cost makes them viable and played almost all the time.

Stuff like Berzerks, Karambit, Samurai and Condos see a lot of use OVER the standard miltia line.

1 Like
13

I would consider reduce barracks cost (100w) too…

1 Like
14

Possible ideas to explore:

  • Reduce their creation speed so you can build up numbers faster
  • Increase their walking speed to 1 or 0.96
  • Reduce their food cost to 50
  • Reduce the frame delay after their attack animation
  • Make Man at Arms/Longswords/Champion upgrades cost the same, but researched instantly (or at least much faster)
  • Make the same upgrades cheaper, but not researched faster
  • Get rid of 2-Handed Swords and just go straight from Longswords to Champions so that they have a much more logical one upgrade per age.
  • Increase their attack vs. villagers only
  • Increase their attack or armour vs. the Scout/Light Cav./Hussar line, so that champions can truly fulfill their late game role as cheap trash killers.
  • Allow them to build non-aggressive buildings such as markets, blacksmiths, university, outposts, walls and/or palisades.
7 Likes
15

“Field Barricades” - fastly decaying defensive structures that allow allied units to stay on it - which also “absorb” incoming projectiles (including stuff like onager shots) like Hussite wagons. (Field Barricades cost wood and gold and also have a cooldown period and are built comparably slowly for their HP, so they can be broken by melee attacks while buit).
This would be so cool micro feature, really hard to pull off right - exactly what an otherwise “pure fighting stat” unit should have.

2 Likes
16

At least the dark age speed bonus can be reverted for Celts.

17
  • Replace dedicated techs food cost for wood cost
  • Reduce militia collision box.
  • Give militia the ability of build siege, at least ram in feudal and siege tower in castle age (require blacksmith).
  • Swap unit cost, more gold than food.
  • Split militia line in heavy and light infantry
  • Add more dedicated techs (+hp, +PA in stand grand stance, running/charge ability)
  • Give militia-line trample damage (to emphasize their power when get massed)
2 Likes
18

I would just reduce the barrier to get into infantry in castle age: reduce costs and research time for squires, supplies, arson, and gambeson. The precise amount may need juggling around, but I wouldn’t find a 50% reduction both in time and costs out of the question. Currently we have 650 resources and 110 seconds barracks time. Seems a bit too much to me to get a unique to be moderately useful, especially when you compare it to the upgrade costs of knights, which are even lower.

Obviously the techs themselves are needed to give variety – not every civ gets the full package.

19

MAA is a weak opening, good only against greedy fc attempts or against certain slow civs. This is why higher up the elo players prefer 2 militia feudal drush, referred to as the french drush and avoid maa upgrade. Its 140 resources spent for very little extra value.

While this is true, its not the only reason for not producing maa. They have a high food cost as well which is difficult to afford once player runs out of sheep.

Agree with a lot of this except a few. First the food cost for an effective number of maa/longswords is still very high and damage potential is low. This means if you produce a lot you’ll be 2 or 3 mins slower to castle age and can’t do enough damage before opponent gets upgrades.

Unfortunately NO, it wont solve the problem. We have a civ with extra speed on maa but what you explain doesn’t actually happen. With squires, you’d save your maa but still need to wait for castle age, siege units to do damage. And even then the archer player can make a couple of knights to snipe the siege and run away. So then you’d also need monks. At that point you only need infantry to defend your monks and siege against cavalry, questioning the existence of longswords. This is why celt players do pikes, monks and siege instead of longswords.

There’s no real purpose for that unit in early stages given the current gameplay. For maa/longswords to get value, uncommon strategies like tower rush should become mainstream. And then you can design maa play around that. Weaken villager’s ability to destroy towers while boosting that of maa. You can follow up maa with towers, block resources and force your opponent to migrate farther. This should be paired with market price nerfs in the feudal age as well to force the migration. Once their base is spread out, a few groups of maa attacking multiple spots will become more difficult to deal with and the trades will turn out more favorable for the maa player. If you were a player from voobly times you’d also know how difficult it is to handle archers everywhere in a tower rush game.

1 Like
20

The problems with Celts aren’t with their infantry. Their infantry aspect is broadly fine.

I’ve seen games where top-end players like Viper are startled by the fact that celt infantry can just outrun or chase down archers in the early game. That’s a big part of what prompted this suggestion.

All those ideas would have little impact at the high elo brackets but be completely OP at the middle ELO brackets.

It needs to be a subtle solution, not a hammer.

Hence, squires in feudal.

Longswords do similar damage per cost to BATTERING RAMS. They absolutely don’t need to wait until castle age to do damage, that’s literally the whole point.

Infantry ARE siege, just siege that can’t be sniped by knights.

3 Likes