So the Romans got Scorpions at -60% Gold as well as extra ballistics and +33% fire rate.
I’m usually not much into scorpions and rarely use them unless I have quite the bonusses for them, like Celts or Khmer, so I’m not too fixed on a perspective to a general power-level of the unit. I personally find generic scorpions generally underwhelming.
However I recently quite used them a bit as the romans and while I would say they are good, they seem nowhere as OP, as I would imagine any other unit line being having their cost cut by that much and still being FU + 2 bonusses. Other heavily discounted units usually are missing important techs to balance them. Goth infantry missing armor, Poles Knights missing armor and Paladin, Berbers missing Paladin, etc.
Roman scorpions are likely ging to be nerfed in the future, which brings me to the question:
What is your general stance on the Scorpion line and what should the roman boni for the Scorpion be?
Do romans have the best scorpions in game?
The current state of scorpions is terribly bad.
They’re slow and clumsy and generally useless on the offensive. They are not like mangonels, they need a mass and said mass can be easily obliterated by mangonels, unless it’s a really HUGE mass, and even then only certain civs can abuse them (Khmer, celts, ethiopians).
Yes, you kinda summed up my feelings on them. I only found that the romans have enough bonusses to make them worthwile and in some games Khmer and Celts. I however don’t think Ethiopians torsion engine is enough to make them viable for me, especially since Ethiopians have good archers. Celts have horrible archers and Khmer have mediocre archers, so you sometimes need scorpions to kinda replace them, I rather use the Ballista elephant as Khmers though, especially since their buff a few month back.
The question however would be, what should be done to them.
I think a for a start they should get a modest cost and training time decrease, to easier mass them.
For me the state if scorpion is good albeit underwhelming, which is fine because I feel they arent supposed to be the core unit of the army.
The scorpion has great dps even against high pierce armor units plus no weakness to skirms. This is balanced by:
its clunkiness, hence increased weakness to onagers and inability to put 50 of them onone tile
its minimum range, hence only being effective when massed or wen grouped with many other units.
the lack of ballistics, allowing further outplay potentatial from enemy units in the mid game.
As every siege unit, it feels great to use in closed maps. For what it is worth, fatslob seems to think the same. I dont play a lot of closed maps, but as a Burmese main I enjoy the halbs+scorpions+bbc combo.
Besides that, in serious tournaments, I only saw castle age scorpions as a defensive play against xbows or cavarchers.
I just feel that because it is so good late game when massed (at least compared to range unit options), it is only fair that it comes along with many weaknesses. For me scorpions should by no mean overshadow the xbows and the cav archers lines in the meta. The “siege civs” who want to play siege should rather focus on the mangonels (along with sone pikes and monks).
I like them. They can’t be too powerful or they’d become dreadfully OP in large masses.
Honestly, I think a big part of why they’re not used much is just meta inertia. Everyone watches the pros using mangonels and getting those big shots and tries to copy that. But tbh, I think a lot of players would probably get better value from scorpions, they are more forgiving and take less direct micro. Whenever I see someone building 10+ onagers I think they should have built scorps instead, they’d be just as effective without risking wiping out your own army with a misclick.
Even though I think Scorpions aren’t that great, I don’t think giving them archer upgrades (on top of siege engineers?) is the way to go, as I think they should not have 10(11) range. Mango/Onager is and should remain an effective counter, which is not the case if they were to outrange them. The extra damage if one were to give them more damage should rather be baked into the basic unit stats.
Heavy scorpion should get 8 range like onagers imho at least. Khmer bonus can be changed maybe if it’s too much, but since we have Koreans with 10 range mangonel line I don’t think it’s going to be too much.
I would like to be able to counter hscorpions with onagers even when my civ does not have siege engineers. One single civ (Khmer) not allowing this isnt a problem for me
Scorpions like Hcannoners are “archer” kind of units design wise. Onagers are have a different purpose, they arr building and ranged unit killers with frienfly fire, so they do not have to be aligned statwise.
One idea I have is that they could be made to deal more bonus damage to specifically the militia line.
Then the militia line could be buffed even further without the risk of making them unbeatable due to lack of a specific counter.
The scorpion could work as a hard counter to the militia line and a soft counter to archers and other infantry.
The main problem with scorpions;
1-needs to be massed
2-huge hitbox(a group of scorpion takes up a huge amount of space)
3-slow
4-range isn’t great,(8 range isn’t that bad, but a group of scorpion won’t all start firing at the same range because of their huge hitbox)
5-very weak to cavalry, difficult to properly defend because of how much space they take
6-expensive + takes time to make a group of them
7-weak to onager and bbc
8-has minimum range, this doesn’t hurt them as much as it would some other units since you cab still damage nearby units, it mostly make it so you can’t focus fire neaby units.
If I were to buff them I’d either give them +1 range, or increase their damage. I’d rather they focus on making infantry and elephants better first tho.
The militia line does not need any more counters to justify some buffs.
I would give them one more range, to keep them in line with Onager range upgrades. They’ll still be countered by Onagers, but it’d be a more even match and wouldn’t be so disappointing as right now 1-2 Onagers shutting down the entire Scorpion play.
It boggles my mind Heavy Scorpion doesn’t increase the range at all. You get +10 HP, +4 attack, small increase to bonus damage, lower frame delay, and +1 PA. Which on paper sounds great for a unit upgrade, but Mangonel to Onager gets +10 HP, +10 attack, increases to bonus damage, +1 range, higher blast radius, +1 PA. They already have 0 frame delay. Scorpions don’t even get a wider bolt, it’s the same blast radius!!
And sure, the Heavy Scorpion tech is cheaper now, and overall the tech is probably cheaper than Onager due to not costing gold, but f.e. early Imp I’ve found it’s harder to have an excess of Wood and Food than Food and Gold.
In a way, the Romans will be a perfect balance test civ for scorpions.
If people build them massivly and win loads of games doing so, we know that they are just far too expensive (the 15% Slav discount never made them viable).
If scorpions are even rarely built with romans and their massive discount, we somewhat get the proof, tgat the unit needs a strong buff.
BTW…
Just checked the wiki.
Scorps used to be way less clumsy, had a 0 or eveb 7 frame delay.
Now they have 42 frame delay compared to the 0 of mangonels. Was introduced with DE. Without any explanation or even mentioning.
That said, I don’t even think changing this would bring them in a better state, cause as far as I’m concerned with gould mango micro I will always prefer that line over the scorps.
Mangos with good attack grounds have just way higher damage output even factoring in the cost. I see no utility where I would cleary chose the current scorp line over the mangonels. But mangonels have some applications wher they are just much stronger than scorps, like when pressuring enemy TCs.
It’s not all the scorps fault though, the mangos are just currently the dominating multi-function siege unit especially with their potential to completely swing games against archer civs.
I don’t really like the current Roman scorps as Balance test, cause imo when we Change scorps they should get something to utilitze over the mangos like for example higher range. I’m not a fan of just bluntly making things cheaper if it’s not used enough, it’s a cheap way to force things into meta without caring about what caused it to not be used in the first place.
The cheaper scorps bonus for Romans as civ is nice and very much appreciated. I just don’t want it generalized.
Just read it 11. Yeah I think this is a really nice idea to give them a utility role and more useful in certain situations than the mangos.
The actual stats of scorpions (specifically in castle age) are generally pretty good against a wide array of targets (most ranged and melee infantry). Imo their biggest drawback is clunkiness, similar to rams, and how strongly their counters work against them, with minimal chance of their own counter play.
I would try increase speed from 0.65 to 0.7 (mangos are 0.6), add attack ground, and reduce their hit/collision size slightly. Maybe only apply the speed/attack ground to the H scorp if devs want to take it slow (like they always do).
Possibly H scorps increase hp from 50 to 60, and another +1PA, so archers can’t counter them back in cases.
A range buff for scorps would definitly be a good. I think Sotl once showed in a vid, that even the 1 more range for scorps kind of reverses the matchup against mangonels.
The hard counter mechanics are the main problem of the games balance. Mangonels need no upgrades and even a single one counters several scorps with ease. Besides that, at least the archer civs build the siege workshop anyway in most games sobeven there is no side investment. It a
Bit similar with the spearline in feudal, that is also hard counter without any upgrades and from a builsing, that has to be placed anyway. Skirms on the other hand counter archers, but need several upgraded to do so. As long as things stay this way, there will be the same meta and tournaments are boring after 2-3 games, because it is alwsys the same archer + mangonel mets.