It’s viable in castle age vs. eagles or with civs with infantry bonuses like Malians. You just need to make a hell of a lot of them with upgrades and tons of barracks for them to be effective. Which makes sense because they are cheap to produce if you have Supplies. Knights cost 3x more gold, crossbow cost more than 2x. And you do see champions sometimes 1v1 in the post-imperial late game, especially from players who are trying to counter Goths.
Castle age Longswords are not supposed to be a safe strategy. They’re supposed to be a 1x TC all-in super aggressive strategy which might fail half the time, but is worth the risk if you’re behind economically or if the late game civ matchup is bad for you. Or even if you hit castle age before opponent, you can go aggressive Longswords while he still has feudal archers.
Longswords are not a team game unit, that’s just the nature of team games.
militia is bad against scouts in Feudal, when it matters most
MAA have 1 more attack compared to Scouts. And you can mix in 1 or more Spears easily without needing different buidlings/upgrades. So if the enemy has Scouts, making more MAA can solve the problem. And it is often better than Spearman, because the MAA can deal with the Archers better than Spearman.
militia is bad against knights in Castle, when it matters most
Similar to the comparison to Scouts Longswords beat Knights with a little margin. And you can have already more Longswords at the beginning of the Castle age. So if there are a lot of Longswords, Knights are not a good answer to this. And again the infantry player can mix in some Spear line units.
militia vs camels is good, but doesn’t usually matter
If some cavalry civs face Camels, they can use the same attack upgrades for infantry to beat the Camels. Against Camels civs it is kinda clear that Infantry is just better than Cavalry, because Camels are literaly desgined to counter Cavalry. 1/3 of the civs have Camels.
militia is bad against archers, unless you’re Malians
Gambesons works too.
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I have said this before, “Supplies” is a failed tech. Introduction of Supplies didn’t make militia line having more use than pre-DE except vs Eagle. And after the introduction of Romans it is proven that a better stat militia line is far more viable than a cheaper militia line.
I’ll remove Arson and replace it with a more usable tech. Then change militia line HP and armor in such way that MAA and LS is just a bit weaker than current Romans. Then I’ll revisit all the existing infantry bonuses and techs, upgrades availability. For example, Japanese may lose Gambeson and/or Champion, Malians may loss Supplies, Romans may loss Squires and so on.
There are few situations where Squires or Arson are useful enough to justify their cost in the feudal age maybe Dravidians, Goths, or Romans could get some use out of it. The reason why this should not be implemented is that it would also affect Eagle civ, especially Incas.
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Squires is quite cheap; it would essentially pay for itself if you save even 2 MAA. Arson is more expensive, but even that could be justified in the case of prolonged feudal aggression.
If necessary, eagle scouts could have their speed reduced by 0.05 or 0.1 to compensate.
This is a false statement that keeps getting repeated. If you open the scenario editor and you put 20 no civ bonus Castle Age FU Longswords vs 10 Castle Age FU Knights, the Knights beat the Longswords. If you give the LS the Japanese civ for the 33% attack speed, then you can beat the knights with 17 LS.
So you need a 1.7x numerical advantage to win with a civ that has a strong bonus towards Militia line to beat a civ that has no bonus towards Knight line. If your civ has no LS bonus then you need >2.0 advantage to win.
But it’s actually worse than it sounds. Because outnumbering the Knights 1.7x to 1 is not easy to do because the main limiter in Castle Age is not gold, but food. 10 Knights costs 600 food. For 600 food you can make 13 Longswords. 13 Longswords loses to 10 Knights. All of this assumes the KT player will just take a fair and open field battle against LS and not go raid you or just hit and run the LS who must stay grouped at all times with a numerical advantage because the moment they aren’t, the KTs pick them apart and the LS player loses his entire army because LS cannot run from Knights.
But wait, let’s fast forward to late game! Surely Champions beat Paladins then right? Food is no longer a limiter, but gold! We can outnumber the Paladins 3 to 1 now! Well no, because for food to not be a limiter, you need a lot of villagers. For you to have a lot of villagers means your available pop cap for spamming Champions is limited. You will not have the popcap to flood enough Champs in a single location to beat Paladins, and even if you do, your opponent isn’t forced to take a fair and honorable field battle where he refuses to retreat with his Paladins.
tl;lr Longswords/Champs do not beat Knights/Paladins even in a vacuum scenario editor environment where we give the LS a greater number advantage than can what realistically be fielded in Castle Age. They only win against Knights/Paladins in fantasy headcanon scenarios that have no bearing on actual gameplay.
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It depends on how big the fight is. 6 LS beat 3 knights fairly conclusively. 10vs5 is a roughly even fight, and can be won consistently with micro. The big problems arise when you get so many LS, they can’t all engage right away. Then you end up with a bunch of them meandering around, while the knights are constantly attacking.
INTERESTINGLY, if you use the Flank formation to perform a pincer attack on knights, then a group of 20 LS can absolutely steamroll them. Just did it now, 10v20, ended up with 6 LS left.
I think it would be more accurate to say LS trade fairly evenly with knights, while being much less vulnerable to the counters, especially skirmishers. If your enemy is going knights and skirms, and you go pure LS, you’ll counter him, because he has sacrificed some of his knight numbers for the skirms.
Certainly not in any scenario outside of a controlled fantasy one that doesn’t manifest during real gameplay.
Actually no, 6 LS lose terribly against 3 knights because you can pull the knights away and heal them
Tbh, even Roman infantries are so bad in Feudal age, IF infantry really wants a play, it has to be much more resilient. (I think it does enough damage already)
Annnnnnnnd I think infantries are pretty insane if there is unwallable terrain - the biggest issue with infantries rn are walls imo.
Knights can hit and run and break through TC walls.
Archers can shoot from range and harass woodlines.
Infantry does not have those options. They can only siege (that’s why you find success with pike+siege right). They can never harass.
I mean, by that logic, knights lose terribly to LS because one conversion hurts them twice as much.
Is micro really so hard? People do it all the time with archers, but somehow expect to not need to do the same with their melee units. Kinda strange imo.
Yea that’s why monks & light cavs are OP! (Seriously)
Really, I think a big mistake people often make is assuming that LS need healing less than knights. The opposite is true if anything; a half health knight is still fully functional, but a half health infantry is basically dead already.
I saw a game recently where it was Celts using Strongholds, and as long as he was fighting within retreat range to the castle’s healing radius, he was winning decisively. As soon as he moved away from that, he started to lose.
The thing is, it is basically impossible to micro away LSs but it is always possible to micro away knights.
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This is a false statement that keeps getting repeated. If you open the scenario editor and you put 20 no civ bonus Castle Age FU Longswords vs 10 Castle Age FU Knights, the Knights beat the Longswords.
I don’t know how to give them upgrades in the editor.
But I tested this with Franks versus Franks to simulate Bloodlines.
In a Battle 20 versus 10 it depends on the starting formation.
20 LS next to each other versus 10 Knights next to each other and 10 LS survive!
4 lines of 5 LS behind each other against 5 lines of 2 Knights behind each other, and the Knights win with maybe 5 survivors.
But if you reduce the overall numbers of the armies it becomes more favorable overall for Infantry.
In 10 versus 5 battles the battle is balanced even with bad formations for the infantry.
In 4 versus 2 battles the Infantry wins most of the time even with bad formation at the start.
Overall I would say fights often happen before the Knight player can mass 10 Knights.
Another bonus for the Infantry is that there can be Pikemen mixed in that need the same buildings and upgrades as the Militia line, so it is easy com-bin-able But it is extreme how imporatant formations are for such fights, this seems to matter more than the unit. But regarding units I think LS against Knight is balanced, but it does not seem like a good choice to make Knights against LS when the Infantry player can just add Pikes. With Pikes it is not balanced anymore.
With all due respects to the devs, they seem to be really allergic to the idea of giving infantry more PA (pierce armour). Militia and other infantry UU are seldom used mostly because of their vulnerability to arrows. This means that:
- Infantry bonus vs building is useless, since they die to anything that shoots. This includes: groups of archers and castles, which can be prevalent in Castle Age.
- Infantry cannot raid and pull back like knights or harass across obstacles like archers. If they lose the battle, they die. If they manage to walk into a moderately defended base, they die.
Frankly, the devs should consider just removing Gambeson and give all militia and infantry UU an extra PA. Just for experimentation (put it in an optional beta patch?), I would like to see how much of a power spike is a 2-PA Longsword in Early Castle, or whether the 3-PA Teutonic Knight can become the juggernaut they were supposed be. I suspect it might not be enough, but it could be a start.
At end of the day, I think militia need to be more resilient in general. They should not counter archers, but they should be arrow-resistant. They do not need to beat a knight man-for-man, but they need to make the melee last sufficiently long. After all, heavy infantry in the Middle Ages were the “holding force” that were heavily armoured and not supposed to break. If you want cheap and expendable infantry, you can always use the spear line.
They would need a lot of people participating in this for a good amount of time and for them to use infantry throughout whatever period the beta runs.
I like the idea, just not sure it would yield a significant amount of results.
Archers are a protected class and must be good and top tier meta at all times. It’s actually hilarious that Teutonic Knights have sucked for the entire game’s history because both Ensemble and the new devs have been scared in general of the idea of infantry being good at any time.
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They can eat TCs though. 11 LS to kill a fully-garrisoned TC, where 11 knights die long before they can achieve the same. Honestly, their ability to wreck production buildings is an undervalued strength. Sometimes just destroying one stable can completely win a game, and they can do that cheaper than just about anything, including rams.
Militia is not terrible vs knights, it trades ok but the problem is firce a fight