Don’t they already have tools to counter pikes, camels, and monks well?
Standard camels are a bit weak, if anything. Alternatively, you could give Frank cavalry +2 attack against other cavalry (not camels) as a secondary effect of their Castle Age unique tech. There are better alternatives, but it’s still better than doing nothing.
None of the knight counters except maybe monks want to go up against masses Taxes which you can amass easily enough with cheaper castles
Yep. It is literally Hauberk+2 attack+25 HP. The final result is basically Paladin with +0.8 Pierce Armor. But I like this type of concept (Savar, Legionary and W.Hussar) as this gives the opportunity to combine multiple bonuses into one unit without simply copy pasting bonuses from other civs.
This is why I always want a Crusader Knight replacing Paladin or even the whole Knight line so that they can become the clear #1 knight in melee hierarchy and maybe also get some of the speed boost of husbandry without actually getting husbandry.
Always has been. 1 additional unit/building design is nothing compared to latest TLC where Champi got 4 different design in 4 ages, not to mention all 3 new civs have a 2nd UU with elite upgrade.
The Teutons were neither meant to have the #1 knight in the melee hierarchy nor supposed to be faster than they currently are.
Sounds like everyone can have a better stable on top of doing almost everything better than the Franks.
this is why I say if you are making a non castle or non dock ynit try to find a second home for it so the effort doesn’t feel like a way to filch us for no real reason
I really dislike this concept. A unit that looks different from normal should also act differently. But Savars are very similar to Paladins, so why should they have a different skin? Same question for Crusader Knights. If they look different, they should act differently.
That’s the core concept of readability.
Way better than Paladin against Archers, they tank much more arrows and have a hidden +2 attack (was +3) vs archers.
the difference between a frank Paladin and a Celt Paladin is about as big as the difference between a FU paladin and a Savar, or a generic cavalier and a Sicilian cavalier. Yet only one of these gets a unique skin.
This is pointless game complication
I think one big alleviation would be more availability of all these niche secondary UUs to make the civ feel less special snowflake. I would be less perturbed by the Savar if other desert and middle eastern and steppe civs had access to it. The legion if some Roman adjacent civs had it and I can’t be convinced the most camelry ever civs are Hindu worshippers and Gujarites and this wouldn’t fit in some new Sahara or other desert focused civs
Isn’t Savar solely a Sasanid thing?
And in fact, 99.98% of people who play Celtic Paladins are just messing about, and rightly lose. The remaining 0.02% is Vincester in a very specific situation
Sassanid (Aswaran/Savaran) and early Muslim (Asawira), but the armor style was also used by later heavy cavalry units even when they weren’t called as such anymore.
It should still be rare though. The Saracen split thread debate prompted me to start researching local warfare traditions in MENA and writing my own sketch doc exploring potential civs that could result from the split… And even though I ended up with a decent number of civs (Bedouins aka the current Saracens, Iraqis, Egyptians, Andalusians, Syrians, Kurds, Nubians, and Somalis), I only give the Savar to the Iraqis because 1. they were most Persianized, and 2. Paladin and its equivalents should be very rare, not given willy-nilly to every cavalry civ. They lose their cool factor once they become too common.
First of all is Savar anachronistic. It’s a bit weird nobody talks about from the “historic accuracy faction”. But maybe there is a conflict of interest there - and some of them only use it against stuff they don’t want to see and ignore the other stuff that is even more absurd.
For me personally. I much prefer giving civs a representational general unit. I also had no issues with giving the mesos militias. It’s a representation for me. And even in europe swords were actually rather rare as armamant, especially for basic foot soldiers.
Giving a civ an anachronistic unit that is then a better version of the before hand general representation unit is actually something that I really dislike. IF you want to give certain civs a better regional flair then at least use the actual historic names for them!
I much would prefer giving Teutons the Ordensritter than Persians the Savar tbh. Because that’s NOT anachronistic.
“Iraqis” is not an ethnicity, they can’t be added.
I briefly looked into it, and it seems the Asawira were recruited exclusively from Persians. Even if they weren’t, I still wouldn’t give them to the Saracens for balance reasons.
No it’s not. AoE2 Persians have the majority of their design space in the Sassanid era, which the Savar falls into.
do we wanna talk ethnicity, let’s not even go there… Too late we are: almost half the European civs are Germanic ethnicity, most of the rest are Slavic, and then there are Celts and the two Iberian civs are Hispanic and then we have the 2 Italic civs
So Iraqis being not a perfect ethnicity is not an issue reallly
Iraq is just an Arabic name for Mesopotamia, derived from Aramaic and Persian Ērag (“Lowlands”), and Iraqis are a mix of native Mesopotamians with Persians and the Arab tribes. Are they a must-have? I don’t think so (Africa first plz), but at the same time they might be one of the coolest potential civs to add because of their use of naphtha flamethrowers by specialized foot soldiers (the Naffatun).
I mean ideally stuff like the Savar or Hei Guang would’ve simply been graphical reskins of the Knight line with no gameplay changes. Devs opened the flood gates.
That said, we shouldn’t really pretend that calling upgraded Knights “Cavaliers” and “Paladins” makes much historical sense either. The game is just anachronistic in some regards, and that’s okay.
I still maintain that there is no absolute need to split so many civilizations into separate factions. Instead, one could simply portray the existing ones in greater detail.
Take the Saracens, for example. The Mamluk unit is depicted in a manner that borders on the satirical—something I feel simply shouldn’t be the case. Mamluks rank among the most renowned warriors of the Arab and Muslim worlds; they even established an empire of their own.
To portray them merely as saber-throwers mounted on historically inaccurate camels strikes me as almost ridiculous.
The unit itself is fine (even if it lacks historical accuracy) and could certainly be retained as a regional unit (provided it is mounted on the correct type of camel); however, the Saracens should at least be given proper Mamluks.
Given that the Muslim empires of the Middle Ages were typically ruled by shifting clans—each adhering to different interpretations of Islam—it remains perfectly reasonable to group them together under the collective banner of the Saracens. They simply need to be depicted with a bit more precision and historical accuracy. At least, that is my opinion.
“Savar” is a general Persian word for cavalry, another name for the Aswaran is “Savaran”. The units physical design heavily resembles Aswaran/Savaran.
Please do check your research before throwing accusations around.
Because the Sassanids got into the Middle Ages, 3K did not.
Loads of AoE2 civs existed before the fall of Rome, but the key difference is that they survived after it.