You do 20% more damage on each unit. So it doesn’t distribute across units. And the other thing is its still extra damage done on each unit. As a percentage increase on overall dps it might become smaller with more units but its still numerically greater. Instead of doing 24 damage on the main and 12 damage on neighboring units, 29 and 15 damage from each urumis is still better. How much of a difference it would do, decreases with increase in opponent army size, true but still better than not having wootz steel at all.
Both units have great potent in large numbers but urumis and fellow glass canon infantry units are not good raiding options.
You can try over and over and over again but you can never use a non-ranged relatively slow infantry unit the same way you would use a fast ranged unit. You might achieve some good results with skirms or killing siege or light cav but not at raiding.
Oh for sure, it’s just not something that’s helped out particularly well. I don’t think there’s any argument that you would want to get it eventually, but to use your Burmese example, you are getting less benefit from five extra damage then a Burmese Champion gets from three extra damage. And as you pointed out, that one’s for free.
I don’t really agree with needing to have large numbers of them, though. Since so much of their strength is tied up in the charge attack, and having large numbers tends to average that charge attack out over time, I think you end up with a weaker unit. You want smaller groups, so you can maximize the effectiveness of the charge attack.
Well, the 20% extra damage on the whole battle field, reduces the number of total hits Urumi needs to slaughter the enemy army. Just to make it simpler, if an enemy had 100 HP after taking the charge attack, once you research Wootz Steel, that enemy will now have 80 HP. Since Urumi’s regular attacks (no charge or splash damage), you’re guaranteed to deal 14 damage which means you will take it in 6 hits (7 in total). If you didn’t have Wootz Steel, you’d need 100/9 = 11 (I will ignore the 1 HP as it is a hypothetical situation) hits which is 12 in total. Can you see the difference between 12 and 7? It is almost double.
The charge attack’s benefit is relatively minimal, and the real benefit is to the normal attack. But the normal attack, even with Wootz, is still so low that, paired with its higher cost, it’s generally not worth fighting in anything resembling an even fight. You’re alternating between something like 1.3 cost efficiency with the charge attack, and 0.7 cost efficiency without it.
Which is the issue with massed Urumis, and I think why they seem to either be really good or really bad. If you have enough to kill your enemy with primarily charge attacks, they’re completely OP. But as soon as you run out of charge attacks and swap to normal attacks, you lose hard.
But given that wootz steel costs enough to pay for 16 urumis, and takes up crucial time at the castle, and benefits the charge attack minimally, and the charge attack is crucial for making Urumis overwhelming, I think going for it could often be a mistake that costs more than it gives.
Okay I see your point. But regular attack is also affected. And once you lose the charge attack, you still need to rely on regular attack. So I think it is still worth to pick up.
Well, that’s the question. If you assume it’s basically a 20% bonus and it pays for 16 extra urumis, then the optimum point to get it is when you’ve already got 80 urumis, which is pretty hard to achieve given the higher cost, castle production, and overlap in upgrades.
By contrast, for champions it becomes cost effective at 50, which isn’t such a massive difference but is a more reasonable number to aim for given they’re produced at a barracks and all.
And bear in mind, this is the ideal case, against a unit with 5 armor. Against enemies with less, it will be progressively less efficient, and just off the top of my head, it seems like most of the dramatic dravidian victories I’ve seen have been times they’ve gotten urumis close and wiped out a cluster of archers or other high-cost, low-armor unit, not against the higher-armor varieties. It just seems to me that if you’ve reached a point where wootz steel is making a difference for urumis, you’re already losing, and your urumis are going to start looking really bad with or without wootz steel.
I’m not making the case that wootz steel is useless or bad, just that it’s not necessarily a universal upgrade.
Now that I think about it, this could be why Hera and Viper have such differing views on Urumis. Literally just having 3-5 more or less could result in the unit being really, really good, or really, really bad.
Its ok if the charge attack averages out over time. Large numbers is the only way to force a fight or get an optimal fight. If you have very few urumis, opponents will kite their ranged units or split the urumis to minimize the splash impact. Obviously 70 might be better than 90 due to overkill but you need to have atleast 40 if there are no ranged units and 50 if there are some.
The problem is, if you average out their damage over time, they end up being substantially worse than champions.
I think what you are actually seeing is not some arbitrary numerical figure, but rather the effects of numerical superiority. It’s not about having 40 or 50, it’s about having ~5-10 more than them, whatever their numbers are.
But that relies on having both production capacity and resource availability to achieve those numbers, and given their lack of long-term economic bonuses, achieving that is unlikely, and indicates you are already winning the game anyway.
Take the exact same number and put them up against equal resources, and you will do much more poorly.
Not en-masse fights, after wootz steel. I can show this through tests. Urumis are so much higher, which is also reflected in actual fights.
Actually this is easy to disprove just by thinking a bit. Take 30 urumis vs 30 champions. Champions have more HP and greater or equal armour. If DPS of champions is higher, they should win. But it’s a stomp for urumis. Even 30 urumis vs 40 generic champions is an easy win for urumis.
Urumis beat every melee unit except elephants, Konniks, FU Cataphracts and 4-relic leitis with equal resources. There might be one or two I forgot, but you are vastly underestimating urumis.
You are correct about the weaknesses in certain ways though. While it is true that they beat most units, You’ll also lose most of your urumis when this happens. They also cost too much food, and are super weak against ranged units.
Most importantly, urumis are total garbage in small numbers. You can get something done with 5 knights. 5-10 urumis are totally useless.
To be clear, I was comparing to Dravidian Champions(as in, which is a better choice for you), not against generics.
That said, large groups of elite urumis actually lose with equal resources, absent Wootz Steel, against generic champions, unless you use your charge attacks very carefully, which isn’t exactly a great indication of their strength.
Interestingly however, a group of 13 urumis lacking not only wootz steel, but also blast furnace and plate mail armor, can actually defeat an equal-cost group of champions with full upgrades, and can do so even better with only a tiny amount of micro.
Urumis outperform Dravidian FU champions is the point. I don’t know why I am even arguing at this point. Once FU, they outperform champions in almost every single matchup.
Wait, these arguments directly contradict each other. Also, they are wrong. Not to mentional that the first argument goes against your earlier argument of wootz steel not being important.
60 FU Briton champions cost 3900 resources. 46 elite urumis with all upgrades except wootz steel cost 3910 resources. In a match up between the two, urumis win consistently with 4-10 urumis left. This is with no micro, just patrolling them into each other. With wootz steel, that number becomes around 20. So, it isn’t even close.
Usually I’d be the one posting gifs, but I don’t see others doing it often, and I’m usually correct. I’m not gonna do that any more, unless somebody else is also willing to put something on the line. So, take this as you will.
If you position the champions to take the maximum possible damage(‘unless you use your charge attacks very carefully’), then yeah, the Urumis can win. But if you give them even neutral positioning, that inverts, and in my 10x testing of 26 vs 34(2210 resources on both sides; it can be handy to google lowest common multiples), the urumis lost consistently, with ~5 Briton champions left on the enemy side. I tested this in my usual method, by setting up three different unit positionings and running them all simultaneously multiple times in succession.
By contrast, 34 urumi champions won every time, regardless of positioning.
I think you missed my earlier point about Wootz Steel; sorry if I was unclear. As I said, it’s not that it’s not beneficial, it’s that it costs a great deal for a minimal benefit, and investing that in additional unit production is likely the better choice until you have a significant number of units, due to the proportionately lower benefit to the initial charge attack.
They don’t contradict each other, it just demonstrates that small numbers of urumis are more effective than large numbers. Which does make sense, if you think about it; when you have large numbers, you end up with a roughly flat battle line, which limits the effectiveness of the splash damage. Plus, the ability to concentrate multiple attacks on the first few units in the enemy formation has disproportionate power when facing smaller numbers of units.
Further, having large numbers of urumis on the field, it becomes essentially impossible to effectively micro them to maximize their charge attacks, since you end up with roughly randomized/equal numbers of units recharging versus attacking. By contrast, in a smaller group, you can guarantee most of them will use their splash damage immediately, and then micro a withdrawal more effectively.
I think the 20% more damage is an wrong assumption. Let’s have a real example - 30 Paladin vs Elite 40 Urumi.
Without Wootz Steel, Paladin wins very convincingly with 21 units left on average. I ran 7 times without any micro.
With Wootz Steel, outcome may go either way. I ran 7 times without micro. Urumi won 2 times with 4-6 units left. Rest of the time Paladin won with 10-12 units left. That’s definitely more than 20% improvement.
As for tech cost vs 16 extra Urumi cost - SOTL made a long 2 parts video where he said 15-16 extra cavalier is almost always better than Paladin. However, almost everyone disagreed as in Post-Imp you’d rather have stronger military than extra military because there is a pop limit.