I realised i have a 70% win rate with Celts. 1300 elo. And most of the wins i used infantry. As celts dont have a viable archer or knight line generally in late game. Also i dont hoang push much. Though i have used that too
But it got me thinking, when im forced to use infantry, i use it and it worked.
So the way to balance infantry is to hold a S tier tournament where players get rewarded more money if they win with infantry. All of a sudden you will see it becoming viable when people actually USE THEIR BRAINS to make it work. If Daut can make cavalry archers work in awkward situations. And hera can make Celt paladins work and viper can win with obscure civs before they were cool they can make infantry work too. But they don’t do it because they don’t commit to doing it. And the plebs don’t do it because they want to copy pros
When you are forced to do it, it works. Check Celt late game win rate. Infantry is the only solid option they have late game so most of their wins is with infantry.
Key point. JUST COMMIT TO IT IN A SMART WAY and add supporting units. Know timings
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Viper easily winning with infantry 3 years ago
Why did you stop viper?
They also got strong siege. Faster firing scorpions and onagers are good against arbalesters, you shouldnt go full champions against arbalesters.
Celts infantry + siege combo works fine if you have it, there is a reasin why they are a popular Black forest civ. But it is really hard to get to it, while everybody is expected to be on knights/xbow in castle age and you are the only civ who really need to transit out of it.
Transiting out of your current army means that you have to spend a lot of resources without making our army stronger, which put you behind. If you can do it (ex, by making a lot of pikes against knights in castle age already), then it should be all good.
Yeah pros can win with obsure strategies, but then why no one uses militia in a serious tournaments? Because even if they can, It does not mean they should, as their opponent is likely a pro as well and will use his brain too, meaning they will stomp you before you even can field enough infantry, or even if you manager, they will stomp you with the bazillions counters infantry have
Basically militia atm is only good in very long game when Gold runs out and you have invested in a militia switch at the right timing. But pro games usually don’t even reach that timing
There’s a reason most pros rates celts very low in their tier list, and it’s not because they are not using their brain. If anything, if for the precise opposite reason
infantry works in 1300 elo but has a number of problems in higher elos. In general you shouldn’t assume that in 1300 elo, opponents react appropriately or make the right unit or macro correctly.
In higher elo however infantry has many problems, among those, being food intensive (delaying your Imp timing), being weak to Siege (1300 elo generally don’t use siege that well), and dying to xbow (which is best unit to macro to Imp behind). Also in Imp, infantry starts having pop efficiency concerns and as soon as the enemy makes HC, 10-15 HC beat basically any amount of infantry so the opponent has 60+ spare pop to do whatever they want (typically add cavalry).
Also while Knights trade evenly vs LS, I’d rather be the Knight player than the LS player. Knights do much better vs fortifications, can raid and reposition better, they also don’t really have a super hard counter unit except Monks while you can argue LS have at least 3 (Siege Xbow and later HC). Even trade as the LS player is not what you are looking for, because the Knights have higher steamroll potential, which generally forces you to add Pikemen. So suddenly your army is looking even weaker to a Xbow/HC switch, and is even more pop inefficient (Pikeman is basically useless vs anything else). On top of this all, the Knight player can go raid you with 3-5 Knights, defend with Castles or TC a bit and bring the Knights back if needed. LS meanwhile can’t really raid or have the mobility to reinforce engagements where needed so you are forced to play a frontal push type of engagement and at that point something like Xbow works just as well.
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