Cavalry can also just run away from mass archers, you don’t have to commit to a fight like this.
There are actually only a few real counters against the knight line, all of which have very strong hard counters against them. I’m actually fine with mass crossbows counter pure knights, because they can easily be caountered by onagers themselves.
I don’t like if you can win a game with only one type of unit. And Knight line is actually the closest one to this strategy. If you remove the mass crossbow advantage of stacking, many civs actually only have one single counter against knights left, which would make them very predict- and exploitable.
I like it the way it is atm. Knight line is one of the strongest if not even the strongest line in the game.
You are joking right? Please tell me you are joking
Sure, it is okay that mass Archers are countering knights. That is totally fine and actually a very interesting game design that in small numbers knights counter archers, while in high numbers it becomes the other way round. I think that makes the game very interesting, however the question is: How hard should they counter them?
Like, you know Skirmishers are countering archers. Yet, if you only build 2 feudal Skirms, you can still micro them down with your archer rush quite easily, without taking losses. Should 2 Feudal skirms win against 6 archers? Probably not.
So 40 archers should be able to counter 20 knights, but they should still take losses. Having a battle of thermopylae situation where any amount of archers can all attack at the same time, but independent of the amount of enemy knights, only 6 or so can attack at once just doesnt make a lot of sense. You don’t need to change any regular stats of the unit to balance archers vs knights. You just need to make them stack less well. Like reduce the number of archers that can stand on a single tile to 4, or some other appropriate number, and the balance will be fine.
What about this: Archer types deal only 1/2 damage against units within 1 tile.
With good micro you can still trade effecive against knights, but you can’t just bump them im 1 tile and they one-shot everything.
The thing is the following: Because of the weird pathing if you don’t allow them to stack, they will become almost impossible to micro in higher numbers.
It’s not terribly uncommon to win with just archers. Happens way more often than just knights because with good micro there isn’t anything that beats archers, players with good mechanics beat mangonels, they beat knights en masse as well. The only thing that might stand a chance is skirms but unless you are aztecs, archer civs can still just win
- give all archers minimum range of 1 (0.8 for arbalest, 0.7 for genoese and chu ko nu)
- when auto-attacking, let them pick the first unit outside of that range instead of closest
- slightly increase collision boxes of said archers (+ 0.1 more for arb, genoese and chu ko nu)
- increase collision boxes of mounted archers, more so than non-mounted, but no minimum range (since they’re mounted, they can fire downwards)
This way, the min range will force a non-stacked formation as soon as ranged non-mounted units want to attack, since they’ll move to proper range. Change is pretty minimal, since you don’t want to engage at less than 1 range anyway. And with the mobility of the mounted archers impaired by bigger collision boxes, you’re much less likely and able to stack those.
- Keep stack on +1range melee units like steppe lancer and kamayuk (but also add a slightly larger collision box to steppe lancer)
- Don’t forget about special ranged units (melee dmg, bonus dmg, multiple projectiles) (gbeto, slinger, arambai, chu ko, kipchak)
- Since onagers and bbcs have min range, this isn’t rly an issue for them.
- Scorps?