The Urumi Swordsman

Age of Empires II: DE II - Discussion
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When this unit was released with Dynasties of India, I initially thought this unit would be really powerful. While testing, it looked like a very good unit in almost every melee combat.

Looking at its stats

  • it has enough HP to not feel as squishy as e.g. Shotels or Karambits,
  • with the charge attack & blast damage it has a really good damage output
  • it is faster than regular archer and infantry units
  • fast training time
  • cheap Elite-upgrade
  • great UT (Wootz Steel)

But even though the unit looks good on paper, I’ve never seen this unit work in a real game.

How do you guys feel about the Urumi Swordsmen? What do you think is the reason behind them not being seen at all? And how could the unit be made somewhat useful or viable?

My first try would be to lower its food cost. I think the Dravidian army already is very food-heavy, e.g. if you go for something like Skirms/Elephant Archers/Siege Elephants and some kind of Infantry.
Alternatively I think giving them 1 pierce armor could make them a little more well-rounded.

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Urumi swordsmen arent seen that much because Dravidan Champions often do well in battle with wootz steel, and Dravidians often die before Urumis are even useful.

But in some melee battles they are OP, esp vs Jaguar Warriors and Samurai, is even unfair lol, and unlike Leitis they in fact lack a trash counter, even though elite skirms do 3 damage to them.

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The unit is very weak and cost ineffective. Its definitely not worth 65 food when it has 0 p.armor. Its much better to just do champions at 45 food and not invest that much villager time into stone collection.

Also they don’t address the weakness the civ has - lack of mobility. While they’re slightly faster than regular infantry, its not by much and you can’t use them similar to how you might use woad raiders.

Finally unlike Vikings, Dravidian eco isn’t strong enough to get them quite far ahead to switch into urumis from crossbow/skirms and get all techs.

So even if you either lower the cost or increase p.armor, it still might not be viable. But if you do both, then it might end up being a better alternative to champs and seen more often.

But unlike Leitis, those battles are fictitious and would never happen in RM/EW.

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Not having a role to perform in the civ.

Good speed with high attack to take down archer? Not enough HP and PA to catch archers. So machine gun skirmishers go brr…
Huge splash damage to take down infantry? Why bother going for a castle unit when u have FU Arbalester, HC. Even EA and skirmishers with faster firing can do a great job. On top of that you have your own Champion which is even better than Aztecs.
Good vs cavalry in big numbers? Again why go for castle unit when you’re saving half of the price of pike and halb?

Armor 1/0 → 0/3
Speed 1.05 → 1.2
Charge attack +12,+15 → attack bonus vs siege +10 and vs ram +2,+3

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I really dislike the unit. Its absurdly OP vs anything melee but does little to help a cruddy civ. Maybe replace it with a more practical unit that isn’t absurdly good in a niche role but instead lifts the civ.

The civ as a whole I tend to disagree with. The whole ignoring melee armor thing is either OP or useless, and-

-Most importantly, how did anyone ever think that a flaccid sword was an anti armor weapon?

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Don’t really care for this idea (or any kind of buff for them TBF). Will make them even stronger in the niche situations where they’re already OP, but doesn’t meaningfully change their role.

Yes, it’s telling that Urumi makes Sam and Jags look like jokes, yet still is not commonly used.

That said, I play Dravidians fairly often, and I can offer a couple counterpoints to the premise:

-The advantage of going Urumi over swordsmen (in the admittedly limited cases where swordsmen are viable) is that Dravidian swordsman have unremarkable stats/performance until Wootz, whereas Urumis have splash/charge from castle. Mixing in just a few of them with any melee comp will improve DPS by quite a bit.
-Urumis are decent vs. mangos or small numbers of scorps (w/micro), and can be used to snipe them before a critical mass is reached in Imp. If I have a castle, I’ll often go for this in preference to investing in their more food-intensive, dead-end light cav. They’re obviously weak vs. Range, but are very devastating to archers if they can actually get close due to their charge + splash.

That’s not to say that they’re usually viable of course. I agree with the overall premise that Urumis are poorly designed.

While I think the Urumi should have a different role from it’s current one, I don’t favor this solution for the following reasons:
-Having been given BBC, the need for another anti-siege specialist is significantly diminished.
-I don’t think anti-siege is a viable niche for a food intensive infantry unit. Eagles are good vs. siege, but they’re also great vs archers and monks, great at raiding, and even have a small anti-cav bonus. As far as raiding/anti-archer, this proposed unit just looks like a weaker Eagle that is much more food intensive and limited in its role (and trains from a castle).
-Giving Dravidians usable light cav via Husbandry and/or Bloodlines is a better idea IMO than trying to turn the Urumi into a castle unit with a gold cost that will end up performing a role that is extremely adjacent to that of light cav or eagle warriors.

Agreed. I’ve said before that I think it should basically have the opposite effect (e.g. being very strong vs. unarmored units, but quite bad vs. high armor units). This could be accomplished with a high base attack (maybe 17-19 for Elite), but having enemy armor be doubly effective. For example, a villager would ignore 2 damage, a FU paladin, 10, and Teutonic Knights would ignore nearly all of it, taking only the obligatory 1 damage.
I also think there are lots of units that are specifically good against Teutonic Knights, so it would be nice for that high armor to occasionally be an advantage outside of low-attack melee units.

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Yeah you can say that. It was my idea even before the DLC release. 11
But this is still in Imperial age + another 100 seconds. On top of that you don’t have SE. Before that you have only LC without bloodlines and husbandry. While BBC was absolutely necessary, another anti-siege option in Castle age is still needed imo. If they get redemption, I will be okay even without Urumi changing.

You still have the blast damage. So better than Eagles in melee.

Husbandry is a must tbh. And as I mentioned, redemption is even better.

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Seriously, what’s been up with this? Let’s build a bunch of units designed to kill a super niche unit? I don’t really like ignoring armor as a concept anyway, especially with how bonus damage already does.

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Uromi beats obuch, elite samurai, well all other infantry units, while it shouldn’t beat samurais i guess it is doing fine within its rol of beating infantry units, the problem is the lack of mobility for dravidians, no one likes the civ in the competitive scene, so you don’t actually see uromi cause you would need to know that your enemy is making obuch, but then the poles just switch to the broken OP winged hussar with trample damage and it melts anything that the dravidian can do including their halbs.

The problem it is still the civ design, they should get cheaper ele archers or knight line.

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This is also my problem. I know gameplay> realism. But they already have the buffed champs and halbs, they don’t need an AP UU infantry as well.

I refer back to my recommendation to make it an anti siege / vil killer, to fill the holes in the drav tech tree.

Either those holes will get filled by making the civ even more generic (kts / redemption) or something else needs to fill em.

Coincidentally we have a redundant UU…

Really? Do we only play post imperial matches? I agree on diminished, but significantly? I would say “slightly”. Due to the number of matches it affects.

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A ctrl+C and ctrl+V from AOE III?

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That’s it. Cysion and his bro designed Hindus and gurj, and some intern made Bengali and drav.

But he left it until the last night before release so had to do a copy/pasta.

“Look what I’ve been designing for months, master Obi wan”

/jk

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Early game elitism strikes again. Obviously it’s only relevant from mid-Imp onwards, but that’s precisely when Dravidians (previously) had absolutely zero answer to any good Onager civ, versus the ~approximate parity in Castle with their own mangos. (I’ve always preferred closed maps for Dravidians BTW, because of their garbage mobility, where games are far more likely to go to Imp). Even on Arabia, supposing only 10% of games go to Imp, there are a lot of matchups that turn into an auto-lose due to Dravidians’ inability to counter Onager +SE, among other things (inability to raid well).

I don’t really have a problem with the Urumi having some anti-siege role (it already has a bonus vs. siege, and everything else, via its charge mechanic), but I think it should have a more comprehensive identity than that. The mechanic I suggested of having very high attack, but view enemy armor as doubly effective would mean it would be good vs. villagers, monks, siege, etc (including bonus vs. rams with their -armor).

But I do think Dravidians need something done with their stable. As it is, they’re basically a Meso-Lite civ that gets gunpowder, and, lacking decent cav, I understand the wish of some people to put the Urumi in a cav or Eagle adjacent role.

These statements seem to suggest something, but I can’t quite put my finger on it…
Ah yes, civ balance! That’s what it is.

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hard to mass.

The unit is quite strong actually.

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Yes apparently using the majority of games to decide how civs should be balanced is now considered elitism? Hypocrisy much?

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Feel free to disagree with my characterization of their getting BBC as a significant buff to their anti-siege capability.

But no need to look for pointless arguments in weird places.

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Because the urumi sword is widely known as one of the deadliest weapons in melee, only highly trained guys could use that, even the owner had some risks by using it at trying avoiding to hurt themselves.

Back on topic, I think Urumis should get 1 base PA to not suck vs skirms but reduce the HP of the elite one by 5, so they are on line with other infantry UUs but not more unfair vs Samurai, Jaguar Warriors and Leiciai(Leiciai need 4 relics to kill urumi in 3 hits, with a -5 HP nerf you will need the common 2 relics).

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Is it? I expect that the AoE2 unit (or some other game’s representation) is the first exposure many people have had to it.

okay, but that doesn’t nearly equate to being effective versus armor (afaik it was almost always used in unarmored or very lightly armored contexts), so there’s some obvious and justified questioning of it in that role. Even something like the Kusarigama shares some similarities - deadly, but difficult to wield effectively - but is more plausible in an anti-armor role (still kinda bad though) because the sickles at least allowed for focused piercing of weak points.

I’d prefer more of a role change than +1 PA, which kind of just solidifies it as a roided-out champ, but I doubt the devs will be so bold.

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This has absolutely nothing to do with ignoring armour, instead of being nationalist, try to consider what the actual weapon does. It is arguably one of the worst things to use against armour

The point being, they STILL have a weakness to siege in MOST matches. Just because that weakness is diminished very late in the game in MOST matches, doesn’t mean they dont still have the weakness. Meaning they still need something to compensate

I’m sorry you don’t like being corrected.

We can only hope. There hasn’t been a precedent wrt UU before, but we’ve had other fairly big changes(Eg considering how much Saracens have changed)

And considering how much theyre overhauling aoe4 naval combat recently, it does mean FE has it in them.

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This is a really bad way too go for this lol. They’re ridiculously strong in melee and now you’re trying to patch their ranged weakness?

?? The Urumi isn’t the armor ignoring thing, it’s the wootz steel tech that has armour ignoring effect