No path finding
Cheap, fast craft, free damage without much risk
His main real counter for mass archers mangonel requires castle+siege workshop (tons and tons of resources and time)
In next update you are going to kill sieges with these archers
This apply specially for english 8 seconds for longbowman its insane
And even going deeper any landmark with “works as stable/archer/barrack” in feudal should be reworked, its terrible to play against that specially if your civ just have economy buff landmarks or whatever else
I like the idea, but not buffing the damage against Light Infantry. I think the damage is good as it is, so keeping the same damage would be nice. Your idea leads to archers would be weaker against cavalry, specially armored cavalry (armored infantry too). Is a good idea.
I feel that Archers (Specially English archers) are way too strong against armored units. I just lost an entire army of MAA+Royal Knights against english MAA+Longbows. It makes no sense, I had a good comp, he lost all his crossbows before, so tecnically he had nothing against my armored units, and still he did it.
The other idea i have would be to make Horsemen have percentage Resistance to ranged damage, or something like: While moving, Horsemen gain 20% resistance to ranged damage.
Total War Experience: Cavalry vs Archers:
Recently, I’ve played other games with Light Cavalry, well, mainly Total War Games (Medieval II, Attila, Rome I), and cavalry there eats archers with everything. Well, actually, every melee unit eats archers if they manage to engage in “melee” combat with them, except of course light infantry, because just like AoE IV, curiously, archers can also “micreate” against light infantry (run away and shoot again), but never fight in melee because they destroy them.
So in Total War if melee infantry get to the walls against archers, the archers can’t microcreate with the limited space and destroy them. I think it should be the same in AoE IV, but with any melee infantry.
That gave me another idea for AoE IV:
Melee Resistance debuff of Range Units
“this unit receive 50% more damage from melee sources”
Since we’re not going to rule out archers’ perfect accuracy, their melee combat could be ruined instead, like in Total War. If they received more melee damage, units like Spearman could do the correct damage they should do if they went into combat with crossbowmen or archers at zero range.
By the way, it doesn’t have to be 50%, it can be 10%, 20% or any other figure, it was an example.n example.
I can take a complete rework for units but i was thinking in something easier to execute from devs side:
Archers, spear and horse have the same economy cost, same craft time
Archers spear and horse are all weak against tc/tower arrow dmg
And thats it, if you are playing english and you are making archers every 8 seconds and i need double of time and double of resources just to counter your units thats the main issue.
And on top of that if hou mass archers lets say 30 archers 10 spearman, my horse cant even enter in the zone, and doesnt matter how much i outplay the opponent with microing, that zone its imposible any normal unit in feudal will die
Maa knights and crossbow are other category, other resources, other craft time. The issue here are the basic units and archers have too much advantage. Spear are decent for the value and horse finish being bad because cost too much for early/mid feudal
I think, here we are going to the point of the issue.
Archers, spears and horses are designated with rock-paper-scissors theory. With equal resource cost, archers beat spears, spears beat horses, and horses beat archers… in theory.
In the practice, it is bit more complicated, because these units act differently in combat. Horses move fast and archers have missle attack in contrast to other units.
The more archers are in the battle, the less horse units are effective against them. Because archers can shoot all at once, while horse units depend on surface area - they can not all target the same enemy unit, or have access to attack a unit.
This is why the RTS design should work with unit roles IMO, not just with rock-paper-scissors concept.
I guess, everybody knows Company of Heroes (CoH), CoH is perfect example how the RTS design works with unit roles and synergies between them aside of “counter system”. Like machine gun and mortar teams are counters to infantry, but they should be used in proper way, otherwise they can be easily killed by infantry squads. Machine guns and mortars have specific role in the battle, aside of being infantry counters.
That is why archers in Age of Empires should have weaker melee attack in close combat, their role has to be missile unit in battle, not just counter to infantry within rock-paper-scissors concept.
I think, In Age of Empires 2, no one trains militia-line units after fedual age (unless specific civilisation), bacause infantry is useless in practice too. That is another good example.
Season 9 direction to nerf melee infantry will test our theory if range units are indeed OP. Bc right now cost for cost, equal tech, light melee cav kills full range composition, no micro. But th moment you mix in melee AND micro… it becomes extremely difficult to maintain the melee cav superiority.
Maybe if melee infantry gets gutted with the Springalds and elite tactic nerfs and the biology buffs, melee cav can regain superiority vs range units?
This was a problem too in Starcraft and many many games… but not in Dungeons and Dragons, or the Starship Troopers movie. The problem and solution are actually quite simple: Line of Sight
Direct fire should require unimpeded Line of Sight.
When a ball of archers attacks, only the front ones should be able to shoot.
If archers would automatically form a 1 line thick concave in order to attack, they would be much more vulnerable to their counters. It would also limit focus fire.
So, they do have it in campaign mode. With the upcoming patch they are bringing siege damage to ranged units with the incendiary arrow research. That’s the same as it is in the campaign.
With that in mind, there is potential to bring this back as a design feature to nerf archers… ie they should only be effective when fighting at range, and are crippled when engaged in melee.
Anyways, there’s not much documentation on why they took melee attacks from archers. From what I can tell this decision was made before launch, leaving us with only conjecture as to why it doesn’t exist post beta.
Other fun things altered from early beta versions of the game, the voice lines on archers show that every civ (excluding mongol) had the ability to build palings in imperial. Understanding why they didn’t proceed with that requires a conversation with the development team, as we can only guess as outside observers.
There are many other differences in the campaign it might as well be its own game mode at this point. I mean, it is, but it no longer serves as an effective onboarding for MP (if it ever did - I think the Art of War missions are better in that regard, but I don’t know if they’ve kept up either).
For sure. This is why I phrased it as a thought exercise, because people often say “i don’t know why they did this” or “this was removed / taken from us” or more emphatic words to that effect. I was trying to (gently) provoke a design conversation beyond “i like this, this should go in”, because that’s not really an effective way to design (and then balance) any game mode, imo.
