Artillery is back! And the cavalry never left…
It’s been a gradual return, though… I think it’s safe to say that the late game is being dominated by heavy cavalry followed by siege weapons that destroy infantry.
Let’s get to the point. The other day I played a very difficult match 4v4 players, they chose only France and China. They created a robust defense to prevent invasions and at the same time they created a steamroller with the French cavalry in front followed by several nests of bees.
The Purple player was only responsible for producing Nest of Bees. He didn’t have a forge or library, but finished the match with the highest KD of 3.99!!!
So it was an extremely tiring match, we lost the sea and then won it. Then we captured the two sacred sites, lost both and recaptured them… and then my team started losing many battles… in the end we only kept the sacred sea site, but my team was losing to the enemy cavalry and artillery steamroller. Then we made a Wonder and miraculously defended it… but… analyzing the game… I was very impressed with the player who got 99 nest of bees, he had the best KD and didn’t research any military technology. It was unbelievable!
The game treats infantry with great disdain. But if you compare it to real history, infantry has always been a much more present component than cavalry.
More importantly, when cannons started entering medieval warfare, cavalry went into decline.
My point is, it has become useless to build infantry in the late game. Cavalry shouldn’t have the aura that video games give it, as if it were unstoppable… basically, in wars, cavalry was stopped with wooden logs; you didn’t need to be a genius back then to invent methods to stop cavalry.
Historically, the transition between the 10th and 16th centuries marks the shift of cavalry from a feudal elite to a professional force integrated into combined arms armies, facing decline in the face of pike and gunnery infantry.
So, a group with firearms shouldn’t lose to cavalry in the late game. You try to combine gunners and pikemen, and it doesn’t work well because the game is not historc-driven as it is. Cavalry should be nerfed from the Imperial stage or occupy a larger population so people don’t flood the game with an unrealistic and unstoppable army.
Another thing we need to talk about is Japanese civilization. Why does it create such strong units so easily when we know that in the Middle Ages Japan was weak and irrelevant? They didn’t even have the technology of firearms, which only arrived in the country in the modern period.
Battles against the Japanese become irritating; they are extremely well-defended (strong TC), lazy because they don’t leave their base to collect food, and have overly strong units that “change the game” too easily.
So it’s necessary to analyze the issue of cavalry and siege weapons that function as anti-infantry, because now people will play playing only with cavalry and some siege weapons like ribauldequin, nest of bees, or catapults to kill infantry.