Archers have a frame delay to allow melee units to catch them.
Compard to a fire ship, galley’s are faster, with more range, and zero frame delay, the galley to fire ship is worse than the archer to knight matchup, how is this logical? so almost every naval game just becomes a “who can spam the most galleys” since there isnt a counter to them…
is this an archaism left from high ping where it wasnt possible to kipchak like microing of ships? i had forgotten how bad it was until i had an islands match today, and of course there’s only italians and vikings to choose from, so the water maps are even more boring… galleys vs galleys using the 1 of 2 factions… yawn
At least if there was a frame delay the fire ship might have stood a chance…
Actually the meta in water maps atm is going for fire and demos and then switch to galley once you can manage to mass them. Fire galley are really strong
4 Likes
and what do you counter massed galleys with?? with more galleys… 
fire galleys become obsolete really quickly, and there’s definitely no such thing as a “critical mass” of fire ships, but there’s definitely a crit mass of galleys…
fire do not become obsolete, they can also provide a nice meathshield for your own war galleys. Also, you have to remember that the timing for the switch is kinda hard, so a lot of people switch too soon and simply get overwhelmed by fire ships.
Another common thing to see is a faster age up into fast fire ship to regain water control against castle armies, which works surprisingly well.
Water balance atm is fine and war galleys are not as op as you depict them