Tigui sucks. What would you replace it with?

Tigui - 200 Food 300 Wood 40 Second Research time

Once researched, it enables Malian Town Centers to fire arrows at nearby enemy units without the need of garrisoned archers and/or Villagers, allowing it to participate in base defense when the player is raided by an opponent. It also increases the number of arrows fired from a Town Center by 5.

On paper, looks ok.

Buuuut in practice it just isn’t. Malians lack bracer, so their arrows are pretty weak. Weak enough that TaTOH and other pros don’t pick up the tech. Even when they have more than 5 Town Centers. It’s no secret to anyone that this tech is just… bad.

But, the Malians have a REALLY strong castle age, on top of being a very well-rounded civ… It might be ok to leave the tech as completely useless.

But useless technologies are boring.

What would you replace it with?

Even if malians had bracer, the tech could became useless in postimperial, because of the long range of trebuchets/BBC and high PA of cavaliers. Its usefulness doesn’t depend on bracer. It is aimed to protect you before imperial against raiding units. It is fine against raiding hussars or shotels with low PA.

It is very cheap for what they do, and can be researched in castle.

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Kinda true this tech won’t often make you super glad you picked it up, but it is actually useful and has its moments of glory. As opposed to something like Nomads or Madrasah that are just fillers.

I suppose the best that can be done wouldn’t be to replace it but to make it even cheaper so that people bother picking it up more.

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I think it’s more about people forgetting this tech rather than the tech being bad. It’s certainly not a tech you build strategies around, but in the very late game, when raids are happening everywhere and you can’t pay attention to everything it is quite decent.

Problem is that you don’t get into those situation too often and if you do, most people forget this tech^^
But especially because it costs no gold, I think it would have its place.

Making it a bit cheaper, as @CactusSteak2171 mentioned might still be a good idea though.

2 Likes

Tigui is actually amazing, it makes their town centers megatowers to secure neutral or forward resources (even in enemy side), it allows you to not tech into camels until imp and farimba. I think it is amongst top 5 UTs in castle age.

The issue with Tigui for pros is that: 1) Malians usually close out the game early due to going archers early to optimize their free gold mining upgrade 2) Malian UU isn’t worth making castle for and 3) If you don’t stonewall even 1 side of your base, you most likely don’t give a potato about defending.

It’s not useless at all compared to some of the other unique techs, towers cost 125 stone and do less damage, TC costs 100 stone and can make villagers, might be useless for pros but for others you can plop these down on resources around the map and not make villagers out of them right away(6-7 tcs difficult to keep production of villagers up and make military at the same time so people don’t build that many normally, these are useful even if they’re idle as long as you put them in locations you want to defend) - it’s extremely frustrating if someone puts these down on every neutral gold and stone and it costs about the same stone as one castle to do it, they can build them while you’re dealing with a forward castle that they used to research it with

I wouldn’t replace it. It’s underrated vs. light cavalry, camels, and anything else melee with low HP and/or pierce armor. Tigui also increases the maximum number of arrows garrisoned Town Centers can fire (the tooltip doesn’t say this for some reason) which makes up for the lack of Bracer.

2 Likes

I actually think it’s decent. If it ends up needing changes, I would rather they tried buffing it (like making TC fire automatically and also +X damage per arrow) before scrapping the concept entirely.

I think it’s okay at countering late game raids with units like Hussars or CA. Helps kill off the raiders without requiring quite as much villager micro to garrison and ungarrison.

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It’s far from useless and it’s very cheap, sure it’s situational but as far as UTs go, it’s one of the better ones

3 Likes

The tech is useful, not great, but considering that precisely because they lack, bracer, since in any case they don’t increase range of the TC. Having more arrows instead is better vs high PA units, like light cav, so it’s actually useful vs late game light cav raids.