Skirms need to be micro’d well and the pikes surround the skirms/skirms consistently micro through the pikes to outmaneuver and lure the hussars while focus sniping cav archers. Having each group controlled somewhat via 1 hotkey each helps - same way for pikes x longbows or any other archer type. Pikes patrol in short bursts, and archer types stand ground and go where needed for the most part.
Yeah that all makes sense. It is just a massive advantage when every Cav Archer auto attack lands on the intended target (Halbs), while the Skirmishers require micro and focus firing every Cav Archer, or they will choose to only target Hussars. And when you do choose one Cav Archer to hit, many Skirms will be out of range (Cav decides positioning), so they’ll try to run forward and die to Hussars.
None of this is a big problem in small numbers (Castle Age), but for large Imperial fights I don’t believe Halb + Skirm can really be considered a counter for Cav Archer + Hussar. I’m not even sure that it should be, since one of these groups requires gold. Countering them with gold units (like Camels or Paladins) is fair.
They perform fine
You confuse performance with winrate. Tatars have been solid for a long, long time, and we need not concern ourselves with a flimsy statistic when we know it to be so.
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[quote=“ApplaudedPoppy2, post:6, topic:169893”]
@MatCauthon3 Can you sometimes reply with some argument that isn’t just spitting some random stat, please?
[/quote]i would also appreciate that very much
This kind of baseless assumption is as useless as random winrate data.
Who knows how good they perform and based on what? Tournament placement? Pros’ thoughts and tier list?
People playing the game… based on how well they do in said game?
I don’t know what else you expect. You aren’t going to have a great grasp of what a civ has/needs without actually playing the civ. The OP wants to know why they aren’t at least 50% winrate. I’ve answered that by telling him that Winrate is a terrible metric for evaluating civilization strength.
My “assumption” isn’t baseless, and it’s not an assumption, it’s an assertion. It comes from playing the civ an excessive amount ever since they were released, and spending an abundance of time playing them during each patch. It is my assertion that the Tatars are a good civilization as of the moment, and that winrate is a bad metric if you actually want to get a grasp of civilization strengths.
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Alright, so winrates with tens of thousands of matches are meaningless (or flimsy, as you said), but your personal experience of a fraction of that is a more correct “benchmark”?
What is the required number of matches needed to assess the true strength of a civ? 100? 500? 1000? 5000?
How many matches with Tatars have you played? I’m genuinely curious. I’ve played only 15-20 so I’m not proposing buffs or anything, I recognize my inexperience on the matter, but I sincerely doubt that you have played a number so big that you can filter off any human error, game map randomness, lag or server issue and so on.
We know winrates are raw numbers, but I’d take raw data with thousands of samples against a fraction of that from a biased source any day.
did you look at the image or do you enjoy skipping past them.
- Not even a thousand. The separation between 47.5% and 50% in this sample is nineteen games.
The meta is infinitely deep. The idea that any amount of games will result in you being able to do a graph-o-meter and have an exact strength reading is flawed.
I can tell you, from experience, Eagles are a hard unit to stop long-term as Tatars because their infantry lacks the last two armor techs, which makes the MU against two of the five most popular civs in the entire game to be dicey.
This is infinitely more information to assert than “but muh 47% winrate and your experience is subjective so.”
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The issue with winrate is not that the sample size is too low. It’s that winrate is not an useful statistic to capture performance per-se.
For example, Franks and Mayans have a high winrate, so you may think it’s because they are better than other civs, but it’s not the only explanation. It could also be that people who really want to win, tend to pick meta civs like Franks and Mayans more, and people who don’t tryhard as much, go for other civs, or even random, and so they lose more, but not directly because of the civ choice. 47.5% winrate means that Tatars win 19 games out of 40. So we are trying to explain a difference of 1 game out of 40. I find my “tryhard” explanation very reasonable to explain a deviation of 1 game every 40. Maybe 1 Tatar player out of 40 is simply one that normally picks Franks and decided to try Tatars but doesn’t know how to play them as well.
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I get 15185 games with Tatars on the same site.
I don’t trust 100% the winrates, which can be obviously flawed by pick rates as well (Tatars pick rate is below the average with 37 civs), but I can’t totally discredit them to favor my experience or anyone’s else.
Maybe you’re super good player that can win even against the odds, in your hands any civ is fine.
Obviously the “Eagle matter” is pure logic and game knowledge. We know militia counters Eagles, and Tatars have the worst militia in the game, so 2+2=4.
Also, I’m not even complaining about Tatars, which were pleasant to play in almost all my matches, just some dogmatic assumption like aoestats = useless.
Even more if we consider that devs base part of the balance (most of it from what I understood) just on winrates.
First… the tier list are oriented to high level players and to arabia only, this a huge factor
And second this kind of relates to the usage % of the civs, players tend to use the best civs (franks, mayans, aztecs, chinese, and so on) and are not very likely to use tatars (+ civs with weird unit transitions are usually avoided by players) so they don’t really know how to play properly the civ and then if someone uses it he is most likely to face a better civ which probably will have the advantage in the matchup thus making it harder to win.
The stats he was referencing was 1650+ only.
You want to try to explain why 1k players do what they do, go ahead. Unless you’re of the camp that we should be balancing for the average player at the expense of the quality of the overall balance, that’s one really good method to make winrate even more dicey.
No, that’s you inferring what happens. What actually happens is that the Tatars generally want to push centrally, and keep their forces together (as archer masses like to be) but Eagles spread out and hit the angles. It gives the meso civs a chance to control the tempo. Hussars can do similarly for the Tatars, but there’s a clean counter for the Meso civs promptly available that will already be upgraded so long as they are also into eagles.
Tatars not only have a terrible militia line, they don’t really have a reason to upgrade it until eagles are on the map and it’s an expensive use of what can be a very serious castle age advantage, played properly, so it’s a totally scrambled matchup.
Whenever I play tatars, especially in team games, I always dominate. They one of my favourite civs which I just mesh with apparently.
The tricky part is what I’d describe as a weak feudal age, ergo I often try to pull off greedy fast castles with them and thats where I get caught out. If a strong fast-castle is pulled off though, they feel pretty unstoppable.
But to summarise some points,
The free sheep are amazing, early castle you want to put down 2 TC’s asap, and you suddenly don’t feel a pinch of food for farms, you can click up to castle age with 4-5 farmers and the rest of your economy on wood/gold, when you hit castle, you plonk down 2TC’s… and you already have ~3 archery ranges, and you’re already setup for mass cav archer production and the sheep means your transition to farms doesn’t hurt the wood / cav archer production nearly as much. Its so strong in this context to get those free sheep and keep your first 3 towncentres booming.
Finally, the late game composition of mass CA + Hussar is so amazing, the mobility dominates slower players, the hussar raids are obviously amazing, you have the choice if you have the extra gold to switch into the even stronger CA+ UU combo. The trebuchets with crazy range makes pushing from safety a breeze, and even defending a treb/bbc push.
Everyone seems to underestimate the CA armour tech, and will take poor engagements against your CA. People will still try to take those “near fights” uphill because they think its worth it, but the hill bonus subtly comes in, and and with the silk armour works together to ruin your expectations of how well fights should be going.
Just my 2 Cents. But yea, used mass CA and silk armour to defeat mass british skirms by using mobility and hills, they’re just such a satisfying and fun civ to play. I am also surprised by their lack of winrate but they’re definitely catered to a certain style of mobility player.
I think straight cav archer play is a mistake mit them.
Tatars have very good fast feudal rushes and should try to use them with special buildorders abusing the extra 400 food on their sheep.
And I’m pretty sure the main reason why Tatars winrate is so “bad” because most people don’t play them to their full potential. It’s even shown in the stats, the early agression Potential of Tatars should lead to about 50-55 % winrate in the early game, not 43 % at 1650+ elo.
yea I agree, I think I am also guilty of salivating for the late game too much and often trying to direct the game that way, when theyve also got a decent scout and archer options in Feudal. Hell, even spears + archers forward in feudal would be strong, no need to upgrade the spears and you transition to CA or full xbows and knights in castle.
I thought i’d chime in here since we’re discussing my favorite civ, with 400 games at 1400 elo.
The notion that the tatar bonuses are hard to utilize fully cannot be understated. The sheep bonus, while good, is nothing compared to the eco of all the top civs, bar none. Hill bonus is strong but of cource situational. Free thumb ring offers a decently strong powerspike since its an expensive upgrade early castle and generally people prioritze ballistics, but matters very little if you are behind to castle age.
It doesnt help that meso matchups are very tough, with eagle + pike + siege being very hard to stop unless you manage to get a castle up.
In a perfect game where you don’t take damage feudal age, manage to be aggressive early castle age with thumb ring, and transition to a boom for tatars super strong late game is oftentimes a game won.
In short, they are a very hard civ to play perfectly but very strong when you do.
I think the best characterization of the sheep bonus is the following (I use the same term for Lith, too):
Easy to use, hard to abuse.
Yeah but the tatar bonus is even harder to “abuse” since unlike the Lith bonus, it doesnt actually accelerate anything. Lith can go for the infamous early drush or 18 pop scouts.
Im currently tinkering with optimizing a tatar version of lierrys drush - flush (his tutorial is on youtube) to see if it has some merit. Its probably already been done plenty by pros but i like to tinker with this kind of stuff for my own use. Otherwise maps like ghost lake and to a lesser extent FC timings is the only place where the sheep bonus can be “abused”.
Interesting. IDK, I think Tatars shouldn’t make drush-flush exactly because of this bonus. The bonus helps to execute one single rush as the total amount of free food is maximum 400 if you don’t lame or have maps with extra sheep. This isn’t enough to support 2 rushes imo.
But I’d like to see that assessment proven wrong.
I think you’ve got it backwards. The weaker your economy is compared to your opponents the more aggressive you have to be. Add to the fact that the sheep bonus doesnt scale at all, it needs to be used to fuel aggression sooner or later. Besides, a drush in of itself is as much of a defensive strategy as it is offensive, if not more.
Its not so much that other civs can’t match your army numbers or even surpass them, but at least then you defend from there knowing they’re not happily booming and running away with the game.
This follows the time tested RTS formula: When they attack you defend, when they defend you expand, when they expand you attack.
Interesting discussion.