I would say that’s because most of those civs don’t really have a particularly strong MAA rush - they have a strong post-MAA rush.
The MAA rush is primarily strong simply by virtue of getting units there so fast the enemy has no immediate response. Most of those civs have buffs to things like attack rate or armor, which primarily helps in fighting enemy units, not so much in causing havoc in their economy.
The big exceptions are the celts, who notably have 60% winrates in the early game, likely because of how their increased speed allows them to more effectively kill villagers, and the Romans(58%), but that’s likely due to their incredible power from getting +2/2 in feudal.
Honestly, the early-game MAA is almost a completely different unit than even a few minutes later, in mid-feudal.
We can tone down Celts in other way. Or maybe MAA upgrade can be a bit more expensive like 125 food. This will give defender a time to respond. And it is still cheaper than Supplies.
I like the idea to move the food cost into wood, this would make a M@A commitment smoothier.
I think the healing idea would not be so much useful instead: make M@A means you don’t have the eco to sustain a tower rush meanwhile, and making tower later in feudal means to delay your castle age timing, giving up to the LS powerspike.
Maybe the tech could be moved to Dark Age and cost less, so you could evaluate researching it before actuallt train troops, if you want to use infantry as main part of your composition.
Another option could be a 10-20% pop space reduction for M@A: short term it would help saving wood from houses, long term it would make Militia line more pop-efficient.
I just can’t see them completely reworking so many civs that way. I think they’ll view the current MAA rush situation as fine, and try to make adjustments that don’t impact it, given most of the rest of the game is pretty well balanced, so my focus is on meeting that goal.
Thanks! Pretty much my view as well.
Bear in mind, you wouldn’t NEED a tower. Alternatively, you could bring your injured and mostly-useless MAA back home, garrison them in your TC, and have three full-health MAA in about 100 seconds. That’s a pretty potent boost early on, and could really swing a fight.
The challenge with moving it to Dark Age is that some civs, like Dravidians or Slavs, would then become inordinately powerful at their MAA rush. On the flip side, it’s expensive enough most other civs couldn’t afford it anyway, so it really wouldn’t make terribly much difference.
Well, that could be ok only if we stick with the current M@A into archers approach, so you hit with the initial M@A, retire them since you have archers on the field, and cure them inside your TC.
But it doesn’t help if you want go full M@A. Or mostly M@A (like adding some skirms to cover them from archers).
In this situation, you would need your M@A outside your base, raiding the opponent economy if things go well, protecting your walls if things go bad.
If you put them inside the TC, you’ll let enemy’s archers disrupt your economy.
The point would be always the same: you could go full scout or full archers, but not full infantry.
But since it would be only a side effect of the tech, I don’t despise it. Only think it would not change almost anything.
Infantry should be the “sacrificable” part of the army, so maybe the tech would incentivate more the substitution then the recovery, like:
cost reduction
training time reduction
pop space reduction
Obviously some bonuses should be changed consequentially, or balanced somehow. And, as I told, I think the cost should be corrected to make it viable and sustainable.
I don’t think going for full MAA is a desirable or reasonable outcome no matter what. They just aren’t versatile enough to do that.
Rather, I think the best outcome is to make them more appealing for multi-unit compositions. Mixing a handful of them in with other unit types, to force the enemy into more difficult counters.
That’s just in the short term, of course. This however does open up the option of deeper investment in the long term, since you will already have grabbed several of the upgrades necessary to make it possible. It’s a lot easier to transition into infantry if you already have a handful of them, than if you need to build them all from scratch.
And it is not like they win 58% time. Their over all W/R is around 53%. So a general buff with some nerf to Romans, Celts and Goths would be fine. Maybe add some more nerf to Malay, Japanese, Vikings.
A defensive approach would be replacing Supplies with Gambeson. Cost need to be reduced. In that way both of us will be satisfied. I’m also in favor of increasing their training time. Strong unit should be trained slow after all. Right now we are all in favor of making infantry stronger but no one talks about training time which is one of the issue in late game low gold champion spam. And also the attack bonus vs building. If they are better against unit, they don’t need to be better against building.
I think civs like bulgarians, draidians, malay, slavs, romans and malians have really strong maa rushes. Also Goths, Incas and Armenians to some extend.
And for a lot of them it is reflected in the selection of that opener also, these civs chose maa often in 1/3 to half of their games or so. The win rate is only slightly above average though - and this is imo due to the maa rush being expected from them.
But ofc, as the maa rush is so highly dependent on timing, there are few civs that can get really strong bonusses to it, as if they had, it would be really tough to stop, especially for “slower” civs.
Totally agree. MAA Rush is basically entirely a timing thing, which could also be easily adressed by small adjustments like a small cost or research time increase without affecting the militia line as such.