The REAL answer to the Infantry Problem

[Pulikesi25]

@DemiserofD

I’d say it’s the opposite, actually. People use mangonels to kill rams because people won’t even bother running, because they know that cavalry can chase them down if they try it. This is a similar chain of reasoning to why people don’t bother even trying to keep their MAA alive, even though people often don’t even bother making their counters. The fact the counter exists is enough.

No. People don’t use cavalry because they need to get close to the rams and might lose units to conversion or get forced into a bad fight.

@DemiserofD

Like the above example, the mere fact they exist will cause the enemy to play significantly differently. You can’t send your army forward if they have an attacking force behind. This forces archer civs to play significantly more defensively, and opens up paths for infantry development which currently don’t exist. I think this absolutely would happen a significant amount of times; basically any time a MAA rush goes well, it would be a reasonable possibility.

That’s not much value. Spamming dozens of high food units just to keep opponent from moving out with most of their army is not worth it.

@DemiserofD

If you have your MAA behind their lines, harassing them, forcing them to repair, forcing them to respond, it will make perfect sense to upgrade them. This requires keeping them alive, which requires Squires.

It won’t. For this to workout you have to increase bonus damage against buildings in general and additional bonus damage against walls and gates. Like town centers, cost of repair for walls and houses should be 2x the building cost instead of 0.5x and rate of repair should be small. Otherwise villager idle time and cost of repairs is too little compared to cost of maa upgrade, supplies, squires, +1 armor and the unit. Assuming players with equal capabilities, in the scenario you went for supplies+squires, for approx every 3 extra maa you do beyond the initial 3, you’ll be behind to castle age atleast by 1 min if opponent is fully walled. And you cant do squires, supplies and spam maa with just the sheep, boar, deer and berries. You need to setup your farming eco.

@DemiserofD

That’s sorta self-contradictory, no? If he’s surprised at how good something is, that means he’s never tried them in that way, but it also means they’re good enough to be worth using in that way.

No. It means he thought they were absolutely terrible but they’re just less bad than he thought. If its good enough to be worth using, some or the other tournament he’d have used them. People did pick Celts a few times in hidden cup.

@DemiserofD

The fact people rarely try new things with Celts also shouldn’t be surprising, given most pro players play on random, only play maybe half a dozen games per day, and so probably only roll the Celts at all once a week at most. Most people won’t feel any need to bother mastering a tactic that is only usable by one civ anyway, and a mediocre civ at that.

People do try different things with celts sometimes. Crossbow opening followed by castle drop into woad raiders, heavy scorps + halbs, the famous Celt Paladin from Hera in Hidden cup finals and by Vinchester in Kotd5 winners round. They don’t try a maa into longswords because everyone knows its terrible. Maybe like Viper realized, its a bit less terrible but terrible nevertheless.

@DemiserofD

I think that would be dramatically overpowered. The MAA rush is already more than decent as-is, even at the pro level. This change would make it downright overpowered at low elos, and maybe high elos as well.

At pro level maa is just abysmal. For quite some time, players have adopted the french drush and stopped at militias and added a spear. Because their opponent can always quick wall and not doing maa helps them follow up archers and get f letching sooner. This change will make french drushes very powerful against meta feudal and greedy fc. That alone could bring about imbalance but thats why I said it has to be accompanied with changes to wall, towers and market. That way no one will be able to do militia opening and wall behind to use market and reach castle age. This will bring back dark age pre-mill drush since that’s very effective against tight french drush builds, double range opening since it will be good against militia into 1 range follow up while its not easy to wall, towers into 2 barrack supplies maa etc. So the meta itself would change quite a bit. It won’t be always scouts and spears or scouts and ranged units.

@DemiserofD

Any change MUST happen in Feudal, but it also can’t be a free massive stat change like that. It also needs to be skill-based and it must require good tactics.

What fits those requirements better than Feudal Squires?

This depends on your definition of massive. But imo there needs to be atleast 3-4 changes. If you’re not removing maa upgrade itself nor changing their speed by default, the other way to do it is weaken ranged unit play by adding upgrades to them (could be production time, speed, base accuracy etc) OR make dark and feudal walls and houses quite a lot against maa along with slightly shorter distance between players and longer distance of resources for each player.

I covered an extensive list of changes to make maa feasible in a thread I made here, check it out:

Changes to feudal age walls, towers, market and the militia-line

There’s been a lot of discussion about the state of infantry, market based all-in strategies lately. Attempts to make the militia line more popular through the introduction of gambesons, have still failed to achieve their purpose. Here’s some of my thoughts as to why this is the case and suggestions to change this situation. Militia-line requires way too many upgrades. Not only are those upgrades way too expensive in terms of food spent for that stage of the game, but also they don’t fetch val…