Why Squires needs to be moved to the Feudal Age

Age of Empires II: DE II - Discussion
1

Imagine for a moment that you want to go for the Militia line in feudal age. You get Supplies and start producing MAA, and you get to your enemy’s base, and you’re doing decent damage.

Then they make an archer. This archer moves faster than you, so with micro, you can never catch up to them. You also cannot get away from them. This means that, while they are accumulating an army, you are only losing units.

So naturally, you stop making MAA. But if you stop making MAA, you don’t need Supplies, which means Supplies may as well not be available until the Castle Age.

Now you get to the castle age. Because you stopped making MAA, you have no troops for an immediate power spike. Still, you want to make Longswords, but wait! You need to research Supplies first, AND the Longsword upgrade, AND squires(so the exact same thing doesn’t happen there, too!), AND probably gambesons. That’s a combined 125 seconds of research time, which means the other player, who is producing knights, has 4 more knights out than you.

To win against knights, you need about a two-to-one ratio, plus he has a bonus 4 knights from the research time he’s saved, so just to break even with him on two stables, you need more than four Barracks going!

Wow, this is really starting to look like an all-in strategy. Now, if he has any ranged options at all, he can build 1-2 archery ranges and still micro you down like nobody’s business, while his knights wreak havoc in your economy. If you try to go for skirmishers, his knights will now trade better than evenly with you, so that’s not an option either.

It makes perfect sense why going for this is not a very good strategy.

But consider if you can get squires in feudal age?

It starts the same; you make a few MAA and harass them. But now, you have the option of Squires being available, so your whole approach to the game can be different. You know if they make archers, you can run. Yes, they can still chase you away, but it will be more akin to spearmen chasing off scouts than villagers killing deer.

So you grab supplies and build half a dozen more, and continue production. Naturally, they respond with archers, but now you can justify Squires, too. Now, when they move to chase you off, you can just send your MAA back, and actually escape! You can attack from multiple directions and move their attention around constantly. They are forced to focus their archers in one place to achieve critical mass, while you can poke at them from multiple directions, taking advantage of their lower micro needs and high building damage to force your enemy to respond. Focused on defending themselves, they will be far less capable of attacking in turn.

You reach Castle Age with half a dozen MAA already on the field, near their base. You grab the Longsword upgrade, and when their first knights come out, you already have a numbers advantage, so once again they can’t engage! Just by continuing your production, you can maintain this advantage for a significant way into castle age with just the barracks you already have, and instead of being forced into more barracks to force your way to a numbers advantage, you can build a monastery or siege workshop or archery range to deal with their archers.

What was a very unstable and negative position is now a reasonable and potent position, just by allowing squires to be researched in the feudal age!

To sum up.

Currently
MAA chased down in Feudal
MAA die/never produced
Supplies never researched
Numbers disadvantage in castle
Too many upgrades
Can’t get enough production
Lose to knights

With squires in feudal
MAA can escape in feudal
Supplies researched in feudal
More MAA produced
Squires researched when archers come out
MAA stay alive to castle age
Reach castle with numbers advantage
Beat knights!

And that’s why Squires should be available in Feudal Age.

8 Likes
2

There will be complaints that this makes spearman too powerful against scouts in Fuedal age but I don’t think it’d hurt scouts that much really.

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make a skirmisher
archers are meant to counter militia

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4

So celts have a better version of squires and it’s free, and we still don’t see massive infantry production in feudal age for celts in high ranked games, with a transition in castle age to the longswords. Of course, any infantry buff is welcome, but I don’t think it will change the meta much in any way.

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I think that both speed-incresing techs (squires and husbandry) are in castle age for a reason. It’s so “natural” capabilities of each unit type creates a certain balance in feudal. There is no tech to increase foot archer speed, so maybe what the devs had in mind was to making them somewhat vulnerable starting in Castle.

Besides, what would Celts bonus be if everyone gets squires earlier?

6

Archers would still counter them, just not a total and complete hard counter.

Much like elephants into monks, some counters are currently MUCH too hard, and deserve to be moderated.

I have seen them used for celts before, actually. It’s not what they do every time, but it’s at least possible. And that’s basically my goal in general; not to make it the best choice, only to make it a choice.

That may have been the idea, but I don’t think, with the past few years of data in mind, that it’s worked out perfectly.

Celts would get a stronger version for free, so they’d still be much better than average. Statistically, squires infantry still move 0.01 slower, while celts move 0.035 faster, which is a pretty big deal. Overall, I think they’d still be fine. If anything, giving players a greater appreciation for early MAA aggression might even make the Celts stronger, by giving people more practice!

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This is a good point, I said the same thing in the other thread about militia line. The base militia line is such a terrible unit choice that even strong bonuses like +33% attack speed (Japanese), +1 armor per age with cheap farms to sustain their production (Teutons), or infantry have +20% move speed (Vikings), etc. still don’t make them a good enough unit to see play outside of 2-3 being used to drush/flush.

Whereas if you compare them to Knights and Archers, civs with no bonuses whatsoever to KTs & Archers will still field KTs & Archers in every single game. It’s clear the baseline unit is flawed when you look at it with this context.

We can all go cherry pick 1000 pro matches and find the one match where a pro made militia line as a core unit for their army. The cherry picking doesn’t make the unit good. It’s still a garbage unit that rarely ever sees play outside of very niche match ups. If archers or kts were as rare as militia line play you’d be screaming for buffs to those lines.

8

True, but there’s a big difference between going for something for the memes, versus going for it because it’s actually a valid strategy. Celts are unique in being able to do this and actually succeed, and that’s in large part due to their ability to keep their MAA alive through feudal age.

Sometimes, relatively small changes to stats can make very big changes in effectiveness. Just taking a unit from being outrun, to being able to run away, can make all the difference in the world. I think just moving squires to feudal could make a profound difference in the playability of infantry as a whole.

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I agree with you that this is a justifiable buff to help militia line out. Where we disagree is that I am of the opinion that this will not be enough to make them see use. Celts have the buff already and we still very seldomly see militia line play from Celt players (outside of drush/flush). We shouldn’t have to cherry pick to find militia play. It should be fairly common. It doesn’t have to be every single game like archers & kt lines but it should be something we see more often, especially among civs that have infantry bonuses. It’s incredibly sad seeing a pro player match involve Japanese or Vikings and they just field Archers instead of their civ bonused militia line.

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10

I didn’t read all of it, but in general it seems like a proposal to make the match so that it could be won directly in the feudal era. Do we need this? This is not StarCraft where a match can only last 5 minutes due to zerg rush. In my opinion, it is quite natural for AoE that matches are protracted and have some bias toward defense in the early stages.

1 Like
11

Not quite; the opposite, really.

MAA is never going to be able to win in the feudal age, because even with Squires, they’ll only be able to run away, not actually engage.

But if they can run away, they can constantly harass the enemy and keep them at home, while keeping the MAA alive into the Castle Age, allowing for a much smoother transition into Longswords in castle age, and THEN you might be able to win!

12

Nah.

What actually happenes:

archer player turtles at home, do 17min castle age xbow with selling stones and destruct the poor maa players.

I dont think moving squires to feudal speed can help much (also does not help that it takes 100F!!! while people sometime hesitate to even spend 100F on wood nowadays)

13

That’s already a dramatic improvement; what currently would happen is, archers kill all the MAA and then attack their eco with impunity.

Instead, this allows the MAA player to take complete map control, which is a victory of its own. Heck, if they do turtle up, you might not even need to research Squires, just the possibility of researching it could make actually researching it unnecessary.

With a more food-base eco, they’ll be up shortly afterwards, but with a standing army that can break down walls and destroy TCs effectively all on its own(11 LS can kill a fully garrisoned, fully upgraded TC), while you’ll need to build siege.

On the whole, it seems fairly reasonable to me.

1 Like
14

If that is true, Squires should not be moved to feudal because it’s OP.

15 feudal archers can eat a maa by 1 shot, so maa is still weak to mass archers and archers go raiding.

15

The problem is, if they leave the base, the MAA come a-knocking. They can’t actually win as long as they’re chased off, but they force a response, because MAA do way more damage to buildings, so all things being equal, the MAA will break in much faster.

So they are obligated to constantly chase the MAA off, and that dramatically weakens their raiding potential. It would still be possible, just much weakened from presently.

16

Archers don’t have to enter enemy base. Maa will be defended by adding wall and some archers.

17

putting squire to feudal age won’t fix the issue, we have celt that has even better version of squire and still militia line is still bad.

I think they should increase militia line speed by 5% per tier upgrade on top of increasing MAA speed to 1.0 and squire in feudal age, Otherwise, there is no reason to use militia line.

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That swordsman would be very muscular man that can run fast with heavy armor. 11

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with Squires Incas should basically be able to beat anything in feudal age against archers you go eagles, agiasnt scouts Eagle cans trade roughly equally, against scouts you can mix in spears, only counter unit is M@A and even then you can evade them with your increased mobility forcing them to also get squires or you can use your own M@A who get 4/5 of supplies for free.

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Eagles in feudal aren’t a really good option. They take years in being trained

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