What makes a top Tier unit?

Age of Empires II: DE II - Discussion
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I plan to make in further Discussions Polls about specific units, how they perform in the different categories, so people can try to conclude how they could be adjusted to be more balanced.

Every Poll has a point system wher 5 is "extremely important whilst 1 is “nice to have, but not necessary”.
Please comment if you think I should add or change something.

Later in the discussion I hope we will also find some cross connections that also should be evaluetade if or if not they are present.

So get’s into it.

The unit is just strong, beats almost everything in a cost efficient fight.
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The unit is pop efficient.
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The unit is hard to kill.
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The unit has high damage output.
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The unit is fast.
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The unit has high range.
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The unit is easy to use.
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The unit has high micro potential.
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The unit has high macro potential (needs not much attention).
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The unit is easy accessable (early on, needs no expensive buildings etc.).
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The unit has low Gold cost.
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The unit has low food cost.
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The early versions of the unit are strong already.
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The FU unit is strong.
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The unit has strong powerspikes to work with.
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The unit has multiple strategic usages (Map control, Raiding, Pushing…).
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The unit has a natural composition partner it synergizes perfectly with.
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It is part of the civs general composition.
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The civs gameplan leads naturally to the unit (cause it eg counters the opponent composition).
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The civ has a strong eco bonus.
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The unit has no heavy counters.
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The unit has only few counters.
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The unit counters some opponent units heavily.
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The unit has a lot of generally favourable matchups.
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The unit performs good vs trash.
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The unit performs good vs Power (gold) units.
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The unit snowballs very hard.
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The unit can damage the opponent with very low investment.
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The unit has niche utilities that can come in handy (like Tarkans bonus vs buildings, monk negating castle drops etc),
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It can ran away from unvarouable fights.
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It can force favourable fights.
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It can camp hills.
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It can storm camps.
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It is good in Chokepoints
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It is good in swarming (open areas).
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It is a basically better version of an already balanced unit.
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It is basically the same as an existing one but has some additional utility.
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It’s just generally considered strong (meta).
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It has certain situations where it really shines and most people don’t know about it and get wrecked (off-meta).
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It has style.
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It is good for TG.
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It’s a good Raiding unit.
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It’s strong vs buildings and defences.
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What makes a unit strong is the entire collection of it’s relation with other compositions in the game relative to that same collection for other units. Relations like fixed cost to unlock/mass, cost-effectiveness, pop effectiveness, ability to force fights, synergy within the tech tree, etc. This forms multi-dimensional network or a similar structure. Evaluation of units is effectively a function of this multidimensional network. Most of your questions are implicitly asking “If I remove all but 1 dimension from the multidimensional network can you still identify whether this unit is a top tier unit?” Obviously the answer is no because the function which evaluates units depends on the information contained in the other dimensions.

To that end with the ranking as described, your questions as posed can and should mostly be answered with 1 “Nice to have but unnecessary”.

Edit: To further this point as of around 10 votes in order for something to be a top tier unit apparently it’s extremely important (rated 4 or higher) that the unit:

  • Have a strong FU version
  • Have strong powerspikes to work with
  • Have multiple strategic uses
  • Have a natural composition partner
  • Be part of the civ’s general composition
  • The civ’s gameplan leads naturally to the unit
  • Has no heavy counters
  • Has a lot of generally favourable matchups
  • Performs strong vs gold units
  • Can damage the opponent with very low investment
  • Can run away from favourable fights
  • Force favourable fights
    And the icing on the cake:
  • Should beat almost everything in a cost efficient fight

Literally no unit in the game fulfills all these criteria. Even if this was some sort of “wish list” many top tier units like Houfnice, Huskarl, and Aztec Monks violate a sizeable fraction of these.

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poll is too long and/or spammy nature, maybe a mod can fix this?

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Agree it has become too long, but Idk how to make it shorter.
Idea of the poll is also to find the most important factors, so it’s fine if some of them fall out. I wanted to include as much as possible cause from only relying on what I think makes a good unit a poll wouldn’t make sense…

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You can’t fix it with out losing data. Also, if you don’t want to vote on all of them, you don’t have to.

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What makes a top tier unit? It depends. Context. None of these things. That said, about the first criterion…

Does such a unit exist? I sort of hope not, since it sounds like it would be horribly unbalanced. Maybe I’m missing or misinterpreting something here…

What do 2, 3 and 4 mean? Also, why when I click “Show results” does it give the mean rating? That’s not statistically valid with this kind of data (regardless of what 2, 3 and 4 mean).

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a unit is no the sum of its parts. a poll like this is useless, since every unit has to be seen in the context of its tech tree.
eg throwing axe men would be useless in most civs, but they have their use for franks because of their cheap castles and because they counter halbs

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True. In 1v1 you rarely see khmer elephants for instance but give them bbc (or even block printing) and the unit becomes op. Speaking of elephants: The setting also matters in assessing how strong a unit is. In 1v1 open maps arbalest and hussars are probably the best units but if you look at team games or even 1v1 closed maps hussars become a lot less important. I guess arbalest is the only unit that performs well in virtually all settings.

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So does paladin technically, it just isn’t viable in all settings. The real unit though, the one viable for every civ, in every setting is… villagers! :joy:

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I have to read them all tho and it’s cumbersome.

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you are forgetting about the most important game mode of all: battle royal

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Me and my 4 friends still enjoy a br match every once in a while

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What it can do for a certain amount of resources, and how much options the enemy can use to counter it.

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Interesting selection of the most beloved properties of a top tier unit. Ofc one thing needs to be said that I never made the claim that it would be “Important”. I actually tried to avoid that naming because it would trigger a different thinking - it would mean that you would basically include the thought of “how often comes this property actually into play” rather then how I like it to actually perform.
I tried to avoid this cause I think it’s important to separate commodity from expection and in-game experience. If I would have asked in a way like this: What are the most important properties of a top tier unit? Everybody would basically be triggered to vote for knights and archers basically and we wouldn’t gotten any other results than the expected ones.
So yeah I am actually quite happy we got different aspects from different categories (maybe some people recognized that the pole was kinda structurized and asked specifically aspects of different categorical aspects of the game). So the result is actually what I hoped for. It’s not a reflection what is already in the game but rather what triggers the feeling of using a top unit.

This is just the natural consequence of that kind of poll. No unit ever will fullfill all that criteria. But that’s also not important. It’s only important that a unit can fullfill some of the criteria and hopefully also those which are somewhat connected. Which I hope we can discuss here at some point also.

It means it beats “almost” everything, so there are counters. It’s about has the unit more generally favourable matchups or is it specialised.

This is actually a part of the poll and a lot of people voted for it. It’s about how it fits in the gameplan and compositionwise into the civ. A lot of people voted for this of being quite important for them, and I am actually of the same opinion. A lot of cav UUs actually struggle just because of this cause it is often just not fitting to make a castle for a cav UU that does basically the same as a knight which is much easier to make from stables. But I start sliding into interpretation which I wanted to avoid at this stage.

Correct.

Is actually included in the poll, but split into several questions.

So far I am very happy with the poll, to me it looks like people give their honest opinion about what makes them feel good about a unit. And it bears a lot of interesting results already. Like that people actually don’t care that much about “SHEER POWER” of a unit but rather a lot of different properties.

This means there are a lot of ways to make a unit “good”, not just adjusting cost and base stats.

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You literally instructed people to rank things on a spectrum of “Not necessary” to “Extremely important”…

Do you not understand what you’re asking? Like I fully understand question/poll design is hard but when you explicitly state “Extremely important” then turn around and say “I never made the claim it would be important” something has gone terribly wrong.

Even if we assume that people are ignoring your instructions (which is generally a bad idea) and ranking these on a “How much do you like or care about this property” scale it’s widely known that players:

  • Like units which do not induce high search costs in terms of searching through the strategy space (has natural composition partner, part of civs general composition, is meta, dont have hidden or complicated interactions, etc)
  • Like units which have high return on investment (kills things cost effectively, low up-front investment, can force favorable fights, etc)
  • Like units which have low risk (counters aren’t hard, can run away from unfavorable fights, etc)
  • Discount the future (gold cost, pop efficiency, etc. are 2nd-order concerns)

Unfortunately this knowledge doesn’t give any information about what trade-offs players are willing to make between the categories in different scenarios. The only thing this poll does is help you miss the forest for the trees and ask overly-specific questions down the line.

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Yeah if you ask people about their opinion you can ask the wrong questions.
But I prefer asking them instead of claimimg to know what they prefer.

If you think that poll is bad, make your own.

Edti: And BTW the results of my Poll actually show that it’s way more sophisticated what community members like about good units than you claim here. The question is why we always narrow down to these shallow things about why some units are great and others suck.

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These are some good questions to ask about a unit and what people think determines a powerful unit.

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So some time has passed, so there is no danger to interfere with the results with discussing them.
I tried to be as least priming as possible though I might have not been perfect, as I admittedly used wrong wordings in some of the questions. BUT for me it doesn’t looks like I have manipulated the outcome by my unawareness too much.
Yeah I’m not a statistics guy, but the thing is… This Stat is actually not about the absolute values or a guideline "how to construct a “Top Tier” unit. It is about showing that it’s less about sheer “Stats” of units but rather more about what role it fills, how it “fits in” And ofc there are multiple Ways to make a unit fitting. But that’s what only was like the “bottom line” of this pole, to show that there are “multiple ways to heaven” and no current Top unit actually fits all aspects of Godness.

But before I get now trashed for somewhat “lying” a bit about the backstory of the Poll (and why it needed to be so long, sorry for that) I think the Results are really interesting and Important. I will first just post a table listing the different questions after their Rating, then we can start to disuss what it actually means - and what we can learn for future unit designs and possible “balance adjustments”.
Don’t forget the Participation on the poll is unfortunately quite low, so all results need to be taken with some grain of salt.

1 It is part of the civs general composition. 4.59
2 The civs gameplan leads naturally to the unit (cause it eg counters the opponent composition). 4.5
3 It can force favourable fights. 4.39
4 The FU unit is strong. 4.32
5 It’s just generally considered strong (meta). 4.29
6 The unit has a lot of generally favourable matchups. 4.28
7 The unit has a natural composition partner it synergizes perfectly with. 4.24
8 The unit has multiple strategic usages (Map control, Raiding, Pushing…). 4.23
9 The unit has strong powerspikes to work with. 4.22
10 The unit performs good vs Power (gold) units. 4.04
11 It can ran away from unvarouable fights. 4
12 The unit is fast. 3.97
13 The unit has high damage output. 3.94
14 The unit snowballs very hard. 3.92
15 The unit can damage the opponent with very low investment. 3.84
16 The unit is just strong, beats almost everything in a cost efficient fight. 3.8
17 The unit has only few counters. 3.75
18 The unit has no heavy counters. 3.75
19 The unit is easy accessable (early on, needs no expensive buildings etc.). 3.72
20 The unit counters some opponent units heavily. 3.63
21 The unit has high macro potential (needs not much attention). 3.61
22 The unit has high micro potential. 3.61
23 The early versions of the unit are strong already. 3.5
24 It can storm camps. 3.41
25 It is good for TG. 3.38
26 The unit is easy to use. 3.35
27 It is good in swarming (open areas). 3.24
28 The unit is hard to kill. 3.2
29 The unit has high range. 3.19
30 It’s a good Raiding unit. 3.14
31 It has certain situations where it really shines and most people don’t know about it and get wrecked (off-meta). 3.14
32 The civ has a strong eco bonus. 3.14
33 The unit performs good vs trash. 3.12
34 It is a basically better version of an already balanced unit. 3.1
35 The unit is pop efficient. 3.06
36 It can camp hills. 3.04
37 The unit has low food cost. 2.97
38 The unit has low Gold cost. 2.97
39 It has style. 2.95
40 It is basically the same as an existing one but has some additional utility. 2.95
41 It is good in Chokepoints 2.91
42 It’s strong vs buildings and defences. 2.62
43 The unit has niche utilities that can come in handy (like Tarkans bonus vs buildings, monk negating castle drops etc), 2.52

The most outstanding Result for me is that Question 1: “The unit is just strong, beats almost everything in a cost efficient fight.” Oly makes Place 16 in the list with a score of 3.8 whilst the arithmetic mean of the Poll has a score of 3.57.
That means quite literally that Basically 90 % of all unit discussions we had in this forum where just like of 50-60 % relevance cause it was always about “the unit sucks, cause it’s just weak” or “the unit is OP cause it beats almost everything”. Ofc it is relevant and it reflects the perception in-game that the unit just performs in a way that feels unfair one or the other direction, but it is often not the real cause of that perception.
So the biggest question is “how do we get from the feeling that ther is something wrong to the cause?”

I will now try it with two example I personally think were “nerfed” for no real reason. But A lot of people complained in the forum besides there were other, actually “stronger” units out there.
Arambai + War Wagon. They are extremely differnt units, though the way they have been received in the forums is very similar. In both cases it was mostly the Arena (MP) community that complained about the FC into them would be too strong. Which wassn’t even that true, given the statistical Results from different stat sites we have access to. They are strong, but other civs with comparable “clown” strats like Spanish or Turks are way stronger. So what’s the difference?
I think one thing is the strategical aspect. When War Wagons or Arambai come you need to respond and if you already have placed several TCs you have a problem cause you are probably required to idle them for some time. Against food intensive clownery you had some more time to produce some vills already so if you have good damage control you can possibly outlast the onslought and win in the lategame. It’s possibly not the best strat but it’s not impossible to win with that.
So it is important that there are several entirely different strats to counter it, not only 1: Make counter military immediately!
The other thing is the compositional thing, number 1 in the Poll. The question was it is “Part” of the civs general composition, not it IS the civs composition. There were other similar questions in the Poll which implied that the civ is basically only that unit. A lot of the other “clownery” civs use light cav, pike, monks, siege + UU. Not only UU + some Siege.
“IF I die to some off-meta clownery stuff I want at least die to a sophisticated unit comp, not a cheesy one-unit strat designed on a drafting table.” <= Is this the right interpretation, the cause why you arena players complained about War Wagons and Arambai?

I ask this cause I don’t understand why exactly these units were picked as being “OP” besides from a sheer statistical analysis and also experience with counter strats they actually weren’t. And it’s an interesting task to figure out if this Poll is any useful to make conclusions for design adjustments of units.

If I’m wrong… well, at least I tried :smiley: