The trend of melee infantry units

Age of Empires III: DE III - Discussion
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Looking at the past of the game from the old gameplays I have noticed how the use of melee units has changed, it is that before the use of these units seemed to be more viable despite the fact that the dominance in the late game has always been light infantry with light cavalry and some artillery groups.

I think we all agree that part of the blame for the fact that melee units have lost their importance is due to the pathfiding that in this final version leaves much to be desired, but I don’t know if the developers have found an alternative solution or they just did it accidentally but the melee units that have given him passive or interesting cards are used more, for example the Landsknecht and the hospitaller (maltese)

Landsknecht in the old game did not have the damage loaded with the first attack, since it was given it was seen much more

Halberdier was very situational, it was used very little, it only used to be used a little with Holland, now that the halberdier gets from 4 to 4.25 speed and the card that increases its speed has moved to age 1, It is usually used in certain strategies in team.

My thought is that making those tweaks to Skills, charge, passive, could help the melee units to generate premises in combat, I am not saying that they are dominant or better than the combo of light units at a distance but if they give them a more strategic use

This is a repost I did in ESOCOMMUNITY

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pathing is one area, besides while attack moving, patroling or broken box formation, where its hard to notice improvement, we’d need some sort of test ran over and over in both versions to determine if there has been improvement, and how noticable
that measure was easy in aoe2 due to resource drop off being so reliant on pathing, but here we need a different method, ik for both versions pathing is better than og aoe2, and aoe2HD and its improvements, but 2DE had quite an improvement which makes me think 3DE had smt similar happen but it’ll be hard to get a good idea of it

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Another factor as well is that range micro has just improved alot so the benefits of melee infantry is just less. the increased selection size also means that microing enough damage to kill melee untis is a lot easier now.

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Melee infantry should be faster… The old Barbary Warrior, was an amazing unit with 6 mov speed, and the possibility to do “cover mode” to get 50% ranged and siege resist. So you would have a good way to “tank” the damage, and good speed when it needs…
Javanese Spearman (indonesia) should get a similar benefit.

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I cannot find this unit anywhere. What is it and how do you get this unit? I can’t find it anywhere in the game or on the aoe3 fandom wiki.

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