You need to do supplies, squires, man-at-arm upgrade and still spend 45 food to cause some idle time. Its a total waste of resources. But yes if you give squires in feudal age there’s a possibility to get that upgrade and supplies after clicking castle age and potential to do some damage against meso civs. Malians, Romans, Japanese and Dravidians could benefit from this like in 1 out of 10 games.
MAA escape in feudal, fight back with skirms. No Supplies, no more produced till castle age is clicked. A few more numbers and better potential for damage in early castle age before enough knights are produced.
That is true full Eagle can be difficult to mass but don’t have to go full eagle unless against full archer play and you also have some advantages that can make up for that.
you can start production as soon as you start unlike archer scout civs
you can build your second barracks before you reach feudal age.
Synergy of upgrades: Squires, infantry armor, and forging affects all of your units
You don’t need to go squires or supplies to do damage. The current MAA rush is perfectly fine and doesn’t really need to be any stronger. But with squires, you COULD go supplies, if you wanted to.
MAA, after all, can break through walls 60% more effectively than scouts BEFORE supplies comes in, and after, it’s closer to 96%. The only problem is they can’t run.
Since Longswords trade better than evenly with small numbers of knights, and you’ll start with a numbers advantage due to preserving your numbers from feudal age, and since LS ability to break down houses is unparalleled for their timeframe(seriously, they are more than twice as effective at destroying buildings compared to knights), I think they’d be a very reasonable option, forcing your enemy to play much more defensively and surrendering map control for a significant portion of the game.
It would not be an overpowered strategy, but that’s a good thing. It means it’s balanced.
I think Man-At-Arms doesn’t need Squire even, increase base speed of Militia-line from 0.9 to 0.95 instead and decrease attack delay of Man-At-Arms because they hit very late in their first hit.
I think anybody would have a hard time justifying the 100 food cost in the Feudal Age to speed up 3-4 men at arms, which alreayd require the MaT upgrade + at least the armor upgrade in order to justify the squires upgrade in the first place.
If anything, militia-line/UU shield infantry would need more pierce armor at the base, for every civ, and some civs get gambeson on top. Spearmen should be vulnerable from archers, not really heavy infantry.
This is a very well put argument. Even if all civs can’t use it, some like goths, japanese and bulgarians can really use this.
For all people saying that this won’t be that impactful, what’s the harm then? People generally agree that infantry need some kind of a buff, so why not try this?
I’m open to arguments, but I don’t see any strong counter arguments to this.
It would be cool if MAA had a buff against palisades.
Currently they are rarely used because they are food expensive and it’s hard to break-in.
In AoM, it was really easy to break defenses and mount a big Feudal attack (like Zeus Hoplites or Loki Hersir rushes). In Age 4, you can even build rams.
Losing and replacing 3-4 M@A would be considerably more expensive (180-240 food and 60-80 gold).
I often play infantry in my game and it would help keeping the army alive until castle age, or at least delaying their death.
Maybe this feature could be introduced as a bonus for an infantry civ, and I think Dravidians would be the better option for it since it would even cost half the price.
The harm is - it buffs meso civs. For other civs it doesn’t affect much on any of the standard ranked maps. Man-at-arms are still going to be very difficult to afford, very minimal damage potential and will continue needing a forward tower follow up. Even more difficult to produce when you have to spend food on an extra upgrade. Civs like Japanese, Dravidians, Bulgarians will benefit on shore fish control maps. Ultimately we’ll get to see a heavier maa meta in the few niche maps where its already quite commonly used.
If you want to increase feudal potential of man-at-arms, reduce hp on house and palisade walls while doubling the repair time. This will make maa+skirms a good option. Increase training time of feudal archers, Increase militia line base speed to 1, it will give them the same functionality but without having to spend extra resources on an upgrade.
Honestly, the feudal eagle meta is already pretty dang meh, so I highly doubt it would be an issue there. Their production speed is just too slow. Incas would probably be the biggest danger of potentially becoming OP, but their food bonus barely helps their eagles, while helping the militia line significantly more, so even there, I’d expect the main benefit to be to the militia line, as intended.
Edit: Now that I think about it further, I think it’s a bit deeper, too; Eagles already outrun everything else but scouts in Feudal Age; Squires wouldn’t change that, so the only impact would be in actual combat. They’d be able to close the distance about 10% faster, but they could already close distance before, and they would still be able to close distance after. They also wouldn’t be able to run away from scouts particularly better. Proportionately, I would be surprised if squires would ever be worth getting for eagles at that stage in the game, simply because the relative value it provides is fairly small.
Just tested this out in the combat simulator just to test, and getting squires is worth about half of an eagle warrior in a feudal fight with 5 vs 9. So in order to justify the cost, you would need to have something like 15 eagles. By contrast, for MAA, it’s taking them from being run down, to actually escaping. That’s a dramatically more valuable shift, and is basically worth getting even with 2 MAA.
Reduced HP on buildings, by contrast, I think would actually hurt MAA more than it helps them. MAA are already profoundly better able to break through buildings than other options, but that only matters if the buildings have some degree of durability to break. Reducing that would just allow scouts and archers to break through faster, proportionately weakening the main advantage of the militia line.
Other buffs, like directly increasing the speed of the militia line, would have knock-on effects like over-buffing the Celts or Goths, and would likely require far more tweaking than just moving squires.
Its not. Militia line is not good and unless you’re playing a middle food control map, you should never make them in large numbers with supplies. Eagles on the other hand are so much more powerful. Numerically the food discount only saves 5 food on eagles rather than 12 on militia line but as a unit the eagle can add a lot of value for its low food cost. You can be chasing and killing skirms, killing a walling villager, running farther away from outnumbering scouts and so on with eagles while you can’t. Technically you might be thinking 0.99 speed after squires is greater than 0.96 for ranged units, so you can chase and kill but that’s too low of a difference to actually surround and kill. Plus it makes a lot of sense to do eagles since they get upgraded in castle age as part of their main game play.
Why do you think people do husbandry when they go stable units? Stable units are already fast. Going by this logic, no one ever needs to do husbandry at all. If your fast units move even faster, you can do more damage or run away losing fewer units. With squires you can kill more ranged units that are running away, kill more villagers before they move into the tc range and lose fewer eagles when chased by scouts. That speed matters.
Yes obviously its not a neccesity but a possibility. They don’t have to but get the option of playing a longer feudal if they want to do so. Its quite usual for non-meso to try something against meso in feudal and this will make them less vulnerable in longer feudal plays.
Scouts are done because they have the potential to kill the walling villager before the wall gets completed and force a few spearmen for defense to complete the wall. Once walled scouts are never going to break anything you can comfortably send a villager and repair or rewall behind. Scouts do 6 damage to houses and 3 damage to palisades. 3 scouts hitting a palisade wall or # ####### a house will need more than 50 seconds to break in. Even if hp is reduced to their dark age values, its still not going to happen.
Maa hit the opponent base quite early in feudal age. Like before they’re fully walled but just have quick walls with palisades and houses. Right now if you try to break a palisade or house in one of the areas, just 1 villager can repair and defend till a couple of archers are out to drive them away. If you reduce the hp of palisade walls and houses, damage potential is higher. Once you do enough damage, it won’t be a bad idea to follow up with blacksmith upgrades and forward towers. After you start the tower rush, opponent will be forced to spread out and then you can get supplies, more maa and fight from different directions. Just doing maa with supplies and squires with the current building hp and situation won’t change a thing. You don’t see celts go crazy with maa anytime and their bonus is stronger than squires. You’ll just be wasting a lot of resources, your opponent will be 3 or 4 mins ahead to castle age and get extra tcs.
That is true. And it will make the infantry play in imperial age way too powerful. The infantry balance is quite tricky that way.
The main reason people grab husbandry is because it makes their Cavalry faster than the other player’s cavalry. Well, that and being able to kill monks with knights more effectively, but it’s mostly being faster than the other player. If they can choose when to engage or when to run away, they have a huge Tactical advantage.
Eagles vs eagles is quite rare, especially in feudal age, so I don’t really expect to see meso civs researching Squires early.
Anyway, regarding building hp, the problem is that reducing it will reduce the amount of time it takes for Scouts to break in faster than it reduces the amount of time it takes for men at Arms to break in. Ie, right now it takes something like 50 seconds for Scouts to break through, versus 30 seconds for men at Arms to break through. Reducing the HP by 33%, would lower the men at Arms to 20 seconds, a 10-second improvement, but would lower the scouts by 15 seconds. In any case, Scouts and archers do break in regularly, so that Niche alone is not enough, they need to be able to actually survive, too.
The nice thing about moving Squires to the feudal age is that it has almost no knock on effects. The only one that people have really pointed out is Eagle warriors, but as I point out above, that’s really not an issue at all. Other than that, it has almost no other side effects.
Speed on any unit will make them run away from unsuitable situations and will help them catch up and do more damage in favorable situations. Like plumed archers while running away from cavalry will result in fewer losses than regular archers. Plumed archers can chase down and kill more infantry units or villagers than regular archers. Knights with husbandry can kill more ranged units and are less vulnerable to camels than those without etc. Its not because they can run away from the same unit type. Units have more uses than fighting against their same kind.
Most of the things you’re saying are theoretical. There’s no 100% guarantee that anything will happen but probability of damage will increase. People go for scouts or archers not because they are guaranteed to do damage but its because they have some low probability of doing damage and in case they don’t, they can still be upgraded and used in castle age. Maa however are not like that. Maa is useless if you hit feudal age, do supplies and then start producing. The main advantage of maa is producing them while on the way to feudal age and the ability to attack before opponent’s feudal army is produced, or in other words its a timing advantage. You attack with maa around 10th min while attacking with scouts or archers is atleast more than a min slower. Even if you hit feudal age 1 min before your opponent, by the time you attack with scouts, spears will be out for defense.
Even in the niche case you’re mentioning where opponent tries to go greedy with castle age and its either your maa or scouts attacking houses. The 10 or 15 second difference matters. You have a higher chance to break in before the walling villager reaches in time. 10 seconds is like time needed to walk 8 tiles. Even if they reach, 1 villager might be insufficient if you reduce the repair rate and might force repair from 2 villagers. Sometimes the opponent feel its better to tower up and they’re rushing the tower. The faster break-in gives you a higher chance to kill a villager.
The number of situations where maa especially the first 3 can cause damage will increase quite a bit. So maa + some follow up will become more rewarding for their cost. Scouts will also become more effective than now in non-meta feudal games but the early damage potential will still remain low.
It doesn’t have many side effects except make longer feudal age a decent option even for meso civs against non-meso, help them get squires on the way to castle age and have a greater momentum. But it doesn’t add any value at all to non-meso civs in meta games. 100 food and any militia-line units produced along with it are a huge waste of resources only going to result in putting the player at a huge disadvantage.
Yes, speed is universally useful, just less so. I simply cannot see people paying 100f to close distance 10% faster with eagles. It just doesn’t make sense.
By contrast, I personally get squires asap on hitting castle age whenever i want to use militia, and would absolutely grab it in feudal if I could.
So I simply cannot agree with your assessment. Not much more I can say than that.