Thoughts on camel scouts

The camel scout is great in concept but is underwhelming in practice. while pikemen are more cost-effective cavalry counter, the Camel rider has several advantages that justify their viability. However, many of these advantages don’t transfer to feudal age.
. Camel scouts require you to be proactive, need a specialized build order that requires you to eat most of your sheep as well as needing a stable. and being proactive with a counter unit is never a good idea because if your opponent does anything other than scouts you are screwed. and even if your opponent does make Scouts, you still making committing to a worse more expensive version of the scout for entirely defensive reasons because it can’t force engagements against the only other calvary unit (which is the entire of purpose of making camel riders over pikemen). Spearmen are created out of the Barracks making their creation incredible convenient with very little prior planning or investment involved. They have a higher Dps and are significantly cheaper mean that is possible to defend yourself with 3-5 and transition to a faster Castle age.

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Camel Scout is a very fresh and effective design. Personally really like it.
The initial one can already give you enough advantages in the Feudal age, and that’s what the developers are looking for. So don’t and shouldn’t have to train more for Feudal skirmish. If you also need anti-cavalry units, Spearmen can still be used.

I think you may have misunderstood its positioning. The second Camel Scout should only be suitable for training when you are already in the process of advancing to the Castle age, so that you could have a group of Camel Riders as soon as you hitting the new age.

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I like them in concept just not in practice. You are right about the initial Scout and being able to mass them before castle age. I just want them to be also viable as a feudal age unit.

btw is there any counter to camel scout / skirm in feudal?

I think archers + skirmishers, but still need micro carefully.

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I like an idea posted in an Elephants thread which consist in reduce bonus of spearman line in general, but increase it by blacksmith melee attack upgrades

Even pure maa counters that. Camel scout and maa kill each other equally fast but maa are cheaper.

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Spearmen aren’t OP by any means.
Halbs are kinda strong yes, but not the whole line.
I think it’s a really, really bad idea. The trash counters in general have been “nerfed” indirectly by a lot of changes and civ additions in the last years.

right. but it’s a weird transition in late feudal, but the whole idea was also just hypothetical

The weakness of Camel/skirm is it high cost and lack of offensive capability So wall up and defend yourself with archer/skirm and if necessary, build a tower then macro your way to castle age. I haven’t tried or seen this, and i could easily be completely wrong but Scouts raids might work not in the sense of actually killing villager but forcing them to send their camels home and then sniping their Skirms with scouts. Scout calvary have a speed of 1.55 will camels have 1.45 so with proper micro you could evade the camels indefinitely. This probably won’t work but if it does it is a big flex.

I kind of like it maybe tie some of the BD to the Attack upgrade

Theoretically yes, but in practice it mostly means that if you make the slightest mistake you lose your scouts. It also means that you will never have the time to stop and attack anything because the camels will always be close behind. And it’s fine if camel scouts are slower, the civ doesn’t need to be completely immune to scout rushing.

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They already are. The issue isn’t the viability of camel scouts, the issue is the over viability of archers. You compare how useful a cam scout is (which is actually very useful Vs every single cav civ) to how busted archers are.

Imo any buff to camel scouts will make them too good where they’re already good.

They aren’t supposed to be auto pick, jack of all trades units. You also aren’t in the remotest factoring in the auto upgrade. Imagine archers auto upgraded to xbows?

Ethiopians aren’t defined only by the fact pikes auto upgrade but it sure helps. Now give those same pikes bonus damage and train faster, also make eth spears available an age earlier.

True the thing about meme strats is that they are less about being effective and more about dunking on your opponent the best civ for this is probably cumans or sicilians. But if you want to actually counter camel scouts use walls and archers

not sure about camel scout but was not a big fan of -1 attack on the camel rider line on the recent update.

not to mention the fact that some indian sub civ doesn’t even have access to camel

imho should at least get camel rider with no heavy camel upgrade, for dravidian, similar to scout cav weak but can bypass armor. and bengalis also get camels or some sort.

camels haven’t lost 1 attack though.

ops I meant this one, only on imperial camels. though it only affected 1 civ

Imperial Camel Rider attack damage decreased from 9 to 8.

damn expensive to upgrade too

They also gst +25% attack rate, and 1 more melee armor now which more then offsets.

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then we just need normal camel riders for dravidians and maybe heavy camels for bengalis