Actually there is no point to compare siege weapon with anything else because they are situational units instead of all around units.
Houfnice and Turk BBC are the best 2 siege weapons. Houfnice is the best option If we need one siege weapon in tier S because Turk BBC is not unique.
We don’t know Viper’s opinion in the first place.
I know the price is not important after I saw both Mameluke and Cataphract in tier S.
I can see a big advantage at a certain timing is enough to place them in Tier S ( Conquistador on castle age), or tier A (Berserk 12+2+5 attack and cheaper price vs knight on castle age)
Siege weapons and ships only compare with themselves in each type otherwise they would be in lower or situational tier.
I disagree with him on Chakram, Shrivamsha, War Wagon.
Most illogical comparison. Crossbows have higher range so can target hit and one-shot mamelukes one by one and move back during reload, villagers vs elephants is a melee-melee fight. So in a practical evenly matched game, you can kill lots of mamelukes with crossbows and win the game but you can never fight a group of war elephants with only villagers and win.
Thats why I said before it depends on how you see this tierlist - whether from pov where they’re already available in big numbers or from the point of having a build to prepare for them and use them as the game goes along. Mamelukes are strong only from 1st pov where somehow you already have 40 of them. Like a campaign scenario or DM.
And also its quite logical to see tierlists that way as well because in regular ranked games, you can’t directly skip those stages and magically get 40 fully upgraded Elite mamelukes.
But what is “best” then? Just raw stats of unique units or hypothetical fights like those shown in MikeEmpires videos? Equal gold cost fights of Mamelukes vs all unique units kind?
I agree there’s a timing advantage with those units but you can never hit that point if its happening too late in imp in most standard games. Getting to a handful on conquistadors with husbandry in early castle age is so much more feasible than getting to a big mass of Elite mamelukes or Elite cataphracts with their unique techs.
You need to find out the conditions of tier S yourself. Your opinions are obviously wrong if you disagree with him on many units. In my opinion, the unit need to match either of the following conditions
1, can fight in small numbers, have advantage over common units with the same gold cost in early game
2. Have advantage over most of the units in late game, won’t get hard countered or traded by trash ( literally need to be faster than skirm and halb, and be able to free kill hussar)
Siege weapons and ships only compare with themselves
I don’t disagree with him on many units but some like Mamelukes or Cataphracts. I honestly feel like his tierlist is a best of the both criteria. And again I’m also including the gameplay to get to a sizeable army of those units instead of just using them once made.
So either early fc-castle drop rush or super late imp with multiple castles. What about the entire mid-game which is very crucial as well?
Those units also have their window where they’re ridiculously hard to deal especially if you have a civ without Camels. They’re late castle age and early imp units which limit opponent’s map control or army mobility a lot. And chakram throwers do melt trash units in late game when you have like 40+, so you’re kind of going against your own criteria.
Every unit is situational, but sure. These are more situational than most. So, you only compare siege to siege. The ship comparison is an entirely different thing because land units and water units don’t have much interaction between each other.
We know his opinion, we don’t know his reasoning. But we can be certain that it isn’t even close to yours. That’s because there are a lot of units in there which can’t do everything by themselves. There are also units like the chakram, which is worthless if you only have a few of them.
I don’t know what you mean by disagree. Let’s say one person is making a tier list of fruits based on how sweet they are, while another is making a list based on how good they look when taking photos. Sure, these are both tier lists of fruits, but it is meaningless to compare these.
Your criteria isn’t what he is using. So, it isn’t meaningful to disagree.
There must be reasons, and I can try to assume his reasons. I listed my opinions already. A lot of tier S units actually can do well all by themselves in both 1v1 and TG except the siege.
Chakram shouldn’t be in tier S and I mentioned it a couple of times. It is a civ situational unit.
Disagree means disagree, nothing else. My agreement or disagreement are none of your business unless you want to discuss a specific unit which you have opposite opinion on. Since you mentioned Chakram. I personally don’t think they are 2 tiers better than Axeman in any situation.
The point I’m making is that your reasoning doesn’t work since there are multiple exceptions. I don’t have a problem if you agree or disagree, that’s your business. But it is not a logically coherent statement. Therefore, it is meaningless.
You don’t think chakrams should be S-tier, he thinks it is. Therefore, you cannot infer his reasoning based on your inference that they aren’t S tier. You have to assume that he has a reasoning to think they are, and work backwards.
Also, throwing axemen aren’t even close to chakram tier. Chakrams are stupidly OP when massed.
Your reply well explained the word " meaningless " for saying something OP without an opinion.
I can’t deny Chakrams are good, but they are not OP. Most of mounted units can fight them. Almost every tier S units can beat Chakrams. In my opinion, Chakram could only be in tier S when you compare it with other infantry.
About Axeman, I know it is not as good as Chakram but it should not be described as “aren’t even close”. Axeman only got 1 disadvantage here, they need to fight in mass like most of the ranged units, With the same gold cost, they actually got advantage over most of the units.
Chakram throwers even beat their counters like arbs or heavy cav once you get a certain amount. Believe it or not if you get 50 of them they even beat elephants. This unit is just hilariously op and probably the best UU in the game right now.
Sure in specific scenarios other units are better like conqs and jannis are the best early castle UU and ballista elephant without a doubt is the best post imp UU but chakram are insanely strong but still kinda easy to mass which makes them way more versatile than the units listed above.
It depends on how stupid your opponent is. I don’t make my unit stack together. I have never lose to Chakram even once so I don’t think Chakram is OP. BTW, foot archers don’t always counter infantry in late game due to the different value of food and gold
Everybody got different opinion on top 1 UU and this is why we have a tier instead of rank.
I do’t think so.
Chakrams struggle against mobile units and siege. Also Hand Cannons can be quite effective against them.
The issue with chakrams is that gurjaras have really strong counters to knights and shrivamsha are also good siege snipers.
The other thing is that Chakrams are a bit too lose on the Gold count. A bit higher Gold cost and they would be perfectly fine. But currently it’s just a bit cheap to go for them.
I’ve seen a lot of games where gurjaras won without any chakrams. Clearly Chakrams add something extr to the civ, but Gurjaras are already really strong without them. Or at least if Chakrams would be adjusted a bit.
Hey, if you want to say meaningless statements, that’s up to you. I’m just pointing it out.
According to your criteria, they aren’t S tier. The criteria being, how well a unit does by a few of it, and without any sort of mass or supporting units. I don’t care if a unit is S-tier or not by these criteria. What I care is how useful/power a unit is in the context of a civ, if the civ was perfectly average in terms of win rate.
So, for example, goths are a below average civ. They need a bit of a buff if you want to make them even. But I can’t think of a scenario where goths don’t spam huskarls. They aren’t very strong by themselves. They lose to heavy cavalry, infantry and siege. But they are somewhere close to the top A tier/bottom S tier as far as I’m concerned. That’s because they do their job exceptionally well. Even the tankiest archer, the Elephant archer, won’t survive a huskarl 1v1.
The best thing about chakrams is the pass through damage For context, champions trade evenly against hussars when market rate is 48 gold per 100 food. If you use choke points or meat shields, chakrams can do it at 33 gold per 100 food. This means that you are just wrong on the claim “anything mounted can fight them”. Even archers aren’t strong enough against them because their chakrams have a pass through range of 7.
Chakrams move faster than most infantry and archers, and their pass through damage means they will hit everything in range, not just their target.
In this comparison, if you try chakrams vs axeman in equal numbers, axemen will win every single time. But put this into context, and add a few paladins(some 4-5) for franks and shrivamsha/camels/elephant archers. You can balance resource in favour of franks. Franks will lose every time if the gurajara micros properly.
I like how this thread devolved to meaningless bickering over the exact placement of units on the ranking. Despite the 1st response in this thread warning of exactly why not to take these things too seriously.
To phrase what I said earlier a bit differently: aside from a ranking which is an unconditional prior distribution of “you should use this unit when you play the relevant civ”, these rankings only have meaning because they reveal relations between the unique unit and the rest of the game. Those relations are the information that can lead to correct decisions in-game or, for devs, balance purposes.
Viper seems to have used the ranking of “This unit fills a niche and it does it very well/well/ok/poorly.” This tends to correlate highly with an unconditional prior for use if the unit is well rounded but not if the unit is situational.
There is no definitive way to rank things in AoE2. For unique units, there are 5^39 possible rankings. Most of these are useless and hard to express but theres going to be like at least 20 rankings which can be construed as valid because they each are A) uncorrelated with each other and B) provide useful information when viewed w.r.t. whatever map ranked them in such a way.
For example:
This is silly. Viper did not make clear what the criteria was for the ranking. I have no doubt that, assuming the map of “The unit fills a niche and does it very well/well/ok/poorly relative to next best alternative”, vipers ranking is accurate enough. However if he was trying to estimate some other map from UUs to rank then he could have done a poor job. If someone disagrees with Viper its perfectly understandable because who knows what the actual function Viper is trying to estimate.
Isolated rankings like this are necesarily lacking a ton of information. Trying to come up with a definitive mapping for ranking UUs is a fools errand. You need multiple maps from N dimensions to 1 dimension to be able to reconstruct the relations in N dimensions accurately. Trying to accurately place e.g. chakrams along one particular dimension is silly because no matter what you pick its going to implicitly ignore certain important relations.
I already said in the previous reply, I only talk about the units all by themselves because almost every UU is useful for their own civ or stronger than a common unit.
Chakrams have to be stronger than champions because they cost 50% extra gold. It seems that you are actually looking for problems on purpose. You also ignored the word MOST OF and pulled out a trash unit Hussar as example. Obviously I did not mean that the weakest mounted unit Hussar has advantage over Chakram.
Everything will be in your favor when you can micros properly. You keep frontline on the move so Axeman can never hit anything but Chakrams can always hit something with pass through attacks. 1 extra range will make you free kill anything with hit and run so Axeman can’t target Chakrams first either. The result is all about Chakrams hit and run or Franks will attack Chakrams first. On the other hand, you have to use camel as frontline or Shrivamsha can’t stop paladin from killing your Chakrams
No it isn’t. Jans have +2 range and +1 attack & cheaper & faster created. Also Conqs can be countered by camels + skirms + xbows While Jans have no direct counter in castle age ( outranges skirms&xbows )
No, skirm + xbow can’t catch Conquistador so it is not a direct counter. Conquistador can actually beat xbow with the same gold cost. Conquistador got big advantage over camels and knights in small number.
Everything can trade well against them while Conquistadors have choice on engage or not.