So there are one of 3 things you need:
Speed, range or toughness.
Knights have speed, Crossbows have range, Swordsman have neither.
Knights have 2/2 armour while Swordsman only have 1/1 on top of lower speed. Gambesones changed it to 1/2 but at a cost.
The problem is that speed and range work well with micro. Toughness works without micro.
That means in lower ELOs tough units will likely beat fast or ranged units.
Knghts have both, speed and toughness.
I think you are letting apart another thing… numbers. Very cheap and short TT units could fight head to head with power units, and become overwelming.
Folowing your thinking, swordsman hasn’t this neither. Even with supplies. The closest thing to this i the Goth’s flood…
IDK. Archer already have timing advantage. And can snowball the game faster than melee units. With cheaper archer this may snowballed exponentially.
Yeah. Good call. I’m also thinking about LS covering the weakness of Xbow more than covering the weakness of Knight.
Can you please suggest pure stat instead of new mechanics?
I misunderstood.
Guess I will do a comparison table between Champion and Spanish villagers. 11
I don’t think that swordsman can be rework like generic serjeant or TK as low elo infantry spamming will become a thing. Combat-related function can be a way.
Scorpions buff and xbow timing buff are double indirect nerfs to swordsman. Longswordsman/2HS/Champions upgrade become instantly researched is one of the stat change? At least knight is immediately available upon Castle age.
I would not see a problem if low elo players spam infantry, I think many of them love Goths.
I am not in favor of new (aoe4 like ?) mechanics.
There are many ways to make infantry more viable without altering much the rest of the game. it always come down to the question what usage do we want to have. A few ideas, each coming with its pros and cons (and none of them making the line fast like a cavalry or ranged like an archer):
Idea 1) make them a super counter to light cav line so that they obliterate all trash units
=> you can play late game champions after securing neutral golds/relics.
Idea 2) make them stronger against all cavalry like halberdiers in aoe3.
=> in aoe3, the difference between the aoe3-pikeman (aoe2-halberdier) and the aoe3-pileman (aoe2-champion) is that aoe3-halberdiers are more expensive, slower, more tanky abd deal more damage against non cavalry units (similar damage against non cavalry)
=> The LS/Champion become the choice supporting unit of scorpions/onagers. Pikes/Halbs are what you use when you are low on gold.
=> a composition LS + crossbow counter (FU skirms, mangonels, scorpiond) become viable
Idea 3) make them cheaper on food, increase the bonus damage vs building or fortifications, and maybe make supply decrease their pop space
=> They become more cost efficients against knights, you can spam them and the opponent has to defend. But they are less efficient than pikes to defend your siege.
Idea 4) Keep them as they are, but decrease very significantly the duration of their upgrades, and replace their food cost by wood cost
=> they can be used early without needing a huge farming eco. They become very easy to spam and can be great to attack a booming opponent.
=> a castle age all in siege + LS composition becomes viable thanks to the no food requirement. Late game the composition misses a lot of power compared to a balance change buffing their stats
=> drush into fast castle may become the standard play due to how little a wood cost impacts castle age timing. (This effect can be removed by having instead the feudal age tech supply converting the food cost into wood)
The “clear” role I want to give to the militia-line is to improve on their current role: anti trash and anti standard buildings.
Would have to add a bonus vs scout-line and increase the bonus vs standard buildings. It should be harder to keep repairing a house being attacked by one or two man-at-arms with just one villager.
To compensate this stronger militia-line, arrow towers should have a bonus vs infantry (maybe through the tech Arrowslits, maybe directly through Guard Tower and Keep upgrades).
Vs cavalry in general I think the main issue is pathfinding. Cavalry can compensate bad pathfinding by relocating fast, but militia-line doesn’t have this luxury.
I believe that with better pathfinding we would be able to micro infantry.
Have you noticed that melee units don’t really fight in formations? They move in formations, but when a target is acquired they start bumping at each other, resulting in only a few getting to the target and taking too much damage before the rest of the troops engages.
The problem is, if you make them good enough (or cheap enough) to beat common unit types easily, people will just spam them en-masse and win, and that’s not fun. It’s not a good idea to make the best tactic also the easiest tactic.
Meanwhile, if you leave them weak enough that the other advantages of other units(like speed and range) can beat them, they still won’t be worth using in most cases.
I don’t see a good balance point here. Infantry simply have a lower skill ceiling, so no matter how you balance or price them, they will be either worthless at some ranks, op at some ranks, or, worst case, both.
They don’t just need more power, they need a higher skill ceiling.
The objective of making LS cheaper is not to make them win against their main counters (scorpions, archers, cannoners, mounted archers), but to make castle age LS or imperial age champions strong enough to be situationaly viable at mid to high elo. Currently they are barely used even for civs with strong bonuses.
But there should be a sweet spot inbetween where they are not spamable enough to be an auto win without being so weak that they wont be worth being used.
I fully agree.
I think it is fine to have some low skill ceiling units. Goths infantry spam is a quite low skill ceiling strategy, so is castle age eagle spam abd late game skirm spam against a civ without plate boarding armor. Units that do not require micro can be balanced if they have a clear use case and a clear counter.
Balanced units come with strengths and weaknesses. Currently longsword strengths are their low micro need and lack of trash counter, and their weaknesses is that they cannot run away from losing battles and are countered by a common power unit (archers/CA).
Longsword could be viable against cavalry spam and force the opponent to use xbows or cav archers.
I am also fine with some units being more common at low elo and less common at high elo, just like I am fine with some civs being stronger at low elo and lesd common at high elo.
In theory, knight>= xbow>>> long swordsman > camels. It is understandable that knight or xbow with smaller bonus is better than infantry with bigger bonus. But infantry with bigger bonus is even worse than camels.
Hindustani camels originally have 25% faster attack rate while Japanese have attack rate of 33% faster affecting both halbs and swords. Hindustani camels was considered oppressive and have got a nerf. So I think other role in addition to stronger trash counter should be added.
Not necessarily. It’s entirely possible that to make them viable at high elo, they would need to be overpowered at lower elos. Meanwhile, they’re currently quite potent at lower elos, they’re just useless at higher elos.
Indeed, I’ve seen Survivalist use them at ~2100 quite effectively and fairly regularly.
So any changes to them need to essentially not impact them at lower elos while making them more potent at higher elos, a tough question to answer.
SOTL just liked how Chronicles handled this.
I gave my 2 cents on this in the comment : I think just like Hussar vs Winged Hussar, Champion should be an alternate upgrade of Two Handed Swordsman. This will save you the upgrade cost and time of Two Handed Swordsman if you have Champion. Then we need to balance which civs get Two Handed Swordsman and which civ gets Champion.
Think its better if a civ gets access to Champions, should be upgraded to Champions directly instead of waiting for 2HS. While we at it, We can give it distinct role. Let’s say Champion is a better counter to Spears with some bonus damage while 2HS being better vs Skirmisher with something. Thus being more unique.
As for buffing it up, Swordsman should be Soft Counter and need more HP to survive. Current Arson should be free and stacked up across ages while Supplies needs to go and 60F should be universal across civ. Gambeson should offer anti-Cavalry resistance.
I don’t much see the point, myself. The problem isn’t that the champion upgrade exists, the problem occurs much earlier, that players don’t get any of the infantry upgrades in castle age. Fix that, and the champion upgrade problems are solved by default.
I still believe Bloodlines equivalent should exist in Feudal Age with long teching time. But fast teching time in Castle Age. Almost how Eagle Scout problem is solved.
I really like certain ideas, by the way I would also give the Champions 0.1 range at this point
We have already discussed this, LS will never be a meta unit at the Castle Age because Arabia is extremely open and players are relatively distant.
In maps where players are closer, for example the LS of the Malians may be viable in certain situations; but the Goths as they are balanced will never be taken seriously in any situation.
I think at least one consensus is reached. Long swordsman/ THS/ Champions should have the role of faster timing, which tech time should be even faster than xbow-line. LS/THS/Champions should be researched instantly. (Definitely not broken as Bulgarians obviously not)
I would like that. Idk if this is achieveable with Champs in the current state. But I also don’t think that’s really necessary.
The main Issue for that is ofc that Knights/Xbows currently occupy that spot - and it would imo actually require them to have longer/more costly upgrades to give that spot over.
In compensation they could ofc get a higher power level when fully upgraded, but as they are designed rn it’s really tough to squeeze in a timing based militia line.
I don´t know. Still militia-line wouldn´t has a “clear” role. No matter what time consuming or cost its upgrades have.
I don’t like the idea of banish the Champion Upgrade either. It works fine for cavalier>Paladin. Just Champion should be stronger but rare.
Not via simple statistical changes, certainly. But I don’t think statistical changes are a good idea in general, because of the skill floor and skill ceiling issues the militia line have.
The biggest problem with the militia line is that it’s actually quite potent, statistically, and have no big weaknesses(like skirm vs archer or spear vs knight). At lower skill levels, they can just win by brute force, and the stronger they get without a skill requirement, the higher that will happen.
The answer, then, is to buff their skill ceiling, not directly the unit itself. I have three changes that can make them far more useful without directly changing their stats at all.
None of these alone would be sufficient, but the combination of the enhanced healing, the ability to outrun archers in the feudal age, and the enhanced map control of the castle age would combine to give them a solid niche as a mid-range everyman, that must be engaged or they’ll come back in a few minutes stronger than ever. By the time Castle Age rolls around, they’ll be capable of not only controlling larger portions of the map safely, they’ll be able to use those active defenses to attack an enemy in relative safety.
But critically, ALL of this is gated by skill. Just being able to get away from archers won’t make much difference unless you have the skill to use them once they get away. Being able to build palisades and outposts is likewise less useful at lower skill ratings, as is the ability to heal more rapidly.
This effectively raises the skill ceiling WITHOUT modifying the skill floor or making them inordinately more powerful at lower skill levels.
I think they have to be at least able to build TC in addition to Towers, outpost and palisade.