Yeomen: Allows creation of Longbowmen at Town Center

We were talking about Medieval times… stories from thousands of years ago. I was just making a silly argument about how historical dynamics can be nonsense in the context of a balanced RTS game.

Anyhow, your change is very extreme (with all due respect). The British Longbowmen are a powerful unit. Even making these units available in Archery Ranges would be a massive buff.

It’s just a joke, my friend.

I’d like to imagine making Longbows available in Archery Ranges is far stronger than making them available in Town Centers.

I’d like to imagine making Longbows available in Archery Ranges is far stronger than making them available in Town Centers.

Well, I guess it depends really. British have a discount on TC’s, and Longbowmen can shoot while garrisoned (and even get some healing). So forward TC’s could be an interesting strategy. Also, if you want to hyper-focus on military, you could use Archery Ranges to produce Skirms/Arbalesters, and then overwhelm with even more archer production from TC’s. Also, spamming archers would be possible even for players who didn’t focus on creating Archery Ranges, and perhaps preferred to create a lot of Stables (Knights) or Barracks.

Also in the long term, TC’s can stop working in late Imperial Age, so producing Longbowmen from them isn’t detrimental (archer spam argument again).

However, I agree that in many situations, producing Longbowmen from Archery Ranges could be a better buff. This is specially true if you spammed a lot of Archery Ranges (cheaper than TC’s), or if your production queues aren’t that busy.

I agree that this is nitpicking, but I doubt human can sustain that speed for hours after hours.
The rest is just off topic so I won’t delve into it too much.

Those are some excellent points. I added the Forward TC strategy to the OP under Strategic Impact.

Regarding the points about ‘archer spam’ and the ‘rapid unit type switching’, I think the high resource cost of the upgrade should be taken into consideration. In a normal scenario, those resources could be spent on Archery Ranges instead.

Thanks for great material.

Nitpicking is my favorite drug.

It’s actually horses that cannot run continously. The famous Pony Express rode their horses in a “run a bit, walk a bit” fashion, which is the normal way to ride a horse long distance since antiquity.

The Pony Express was set up to provide a fresh horse every 10-15 miles and a fresh rider every 75-100 miles. 75 horses were needed total to make a one-way trip. Average speed was 10 miles per hour.

Horse speed at long distance with a rider on its back (not carrying weapons and armor) and changing to fresh horses along the way: (10mph x 1.6 = 16kmph) (16kmph / 3.6 = 4.4 meters per second

Marathon runners can run for hours at this sort of pace. They run the 42 km long race in about 2 hours. (42 km / 2 h = 21 kmph) (21 kmph / 3.6 = 5.83 meters per second).

Ultramarathon runners cover a distance of 100 km in about 6 hours. (100km / 6h = 16.67 kmph) (16.67 kmph / 3.6 = 4.63 meters per second). - Still faster than horses.

Thanks

1 Like

I really like the idea, both because it would encourage Britons to go for longbows instead of arbs, and because making a UU from a TC world be cool (and would feel very different from making the UU from archery rangers/barracks/stables)

But on the balance I think it would be a buff.

In imp I prefer longbows mostly because of their +1 damage, and TC spam would be strong for quite a number of reasons (protection, reboom potential, offensive villagers).

Perhaps if combined with a bigger nerf (eg imp no longer grants an extra +1 range) it could be cool and workable.

3 Likes

This argument is kinda funny, but let’s be real, does the AoE2 king look like an ultra marathon runner 11

Coming back to the main subject, longbows in archery ranges sounds unoriginal, but they also happen to belong to the civ with 20% faster archery range. And what do the civs with 20% faster barracks or stable have? A castle age UT that makes their UU available in the relevant common production building. Not the most compelling argument but some people might appreciate the consistency.

Regarding balance you might think longbows in archery ranges is a massive buff, but think about it, if you remove the extra range you already nerfed longbows, arbs AND skirms, so you have to make the new effect kinda good.

That’s also why I think if this was ever implemented the cost would have to be lowered. Right now the tech is so expensive because it used to be the Briton’s imp UT, and it is powerful. If you keep it at this price, then people will avoid getting it in castle age, and will probs still favour arbs, which isn’t what you want of course. The new price should be around Anarchy’s price (450F 250G)

3 Likes

Here are the statistics:

Britons and Franks are the most overused civs in the game.

It’s for sure worth bringing up. And to tie it together with your point regarding the tuning of the price of the tech, the way they tuned the similar Huns and Goths UT was also by:

Training time

Tarkan Huns
14 seconds (Castle)
21 seconds (Stable)

Huskarl Goths
16 seconds (Castle)
13 seconds (Barracks)

Note that Tarkans train more slowly at Stables while Huskarl train more quickly at Barracks compared to at Castles.
I wonder what’s a good training time for Longbows trained at Town Centers. (18 seconds at Castles)

Hi, thanks for contributing some solid numbers to the discussion. They are a sure way to lend some insight if they are interpreted properly.

1. Huns    10.69%
2. Franks 	8.49%
3. Goths 	6.29%
4. Britons 	4.88%
5. Khmer 	4.81%
6. Mongols 	4.70%
7. Persians 4.39%

I’d argue Huns, Franks and Goths were the most overused civs in the game by a wide margin.
Seeing as the proposed change is not necessarily an overall buff, the popularity of the civs is not so important.

Thanks

That’s deathmatch. change it to random map, 1v1, tiny

Very good. Can you suggest a way of tuning this change so that it is a nerf?

Ofc unless you don’t like the idea for other reasons, in which case the statistics are irrelevant.

These are 'Death Match" stats, pick “Random Map” from the slider.

How did you get the stats as numbers? When I check the link everything is represented by columns without any number so it’s very innacurate.

Very cool idea… so Longbows have less range and towers don’t get the extra attack… could be interesting.

1 Like

The game is based on historical events, it’s not supposed to be 100% accurate

1 Like

But why would they live in the city hall then 11

1 Like

I like these forums. Super crisp and nice formatting tools, notifications, edit history, reply and quote tools. But it’s also a bit restrictive. New users get to make 5 comments per day :rofl: And I can’t edit my post now because the window is only a couple of days :right_anger_bubble: This is what happens when you put engineers in charge of policy-making :nerd_face:

I think there’s something being missed in your analysis of making Longbows from the TC, namely that it’d be “worse than using your archery ranges since you’ll have to pick between Longbows or Villagers.”

You don’t make villagers from your TC in the same phase of the game you’d make Longbows. Longbows are an imperial transition unit, at the earliest. By the time you would be transitioning, it’s quite likely your TC’s will drop idle as you stop making villagers. Practically the most expensive composition a Briton could realistically field doesn’t require the resources from more than ~100 villagers, once upgrades have been handled.

When you reach that point, this tech is simply giving you more military production buildings by turning your TC’s (which would otherwise be doing nothing) into a military production building. You might not think you’ll make enough TC’s to be a serious problem, but you also don’t need to transition into 100% longbows. There’s a lot of good reason to supplement your Longbow mass with Skirms, Halbs, or even Champions, which mitigates the losses for the Longbows and negates the lesser production count.

I think it’s unclear that this altered version of an Anarchy-like tech would be worse than just simply giving them archery range production. Further, I think removing Yeomen to do so would completely destroy the motivation for making such a change, as the Longbow would then only make the same range as the Arbalest pre-change, not a nerf I deem necessary to a civ with extremely limited siege (outside of their Trebuchets) and unremarkable cavalry options.

2 Likes

Longbows are a trap. Crossbows and Arbs are just better due to the better accuracy, costing less to upgrade and easier to mass.

In the end longbows have same issue as most melee cavalry UUs and Samurai, they can easily be replaced by generic unit and perform better. Even if those UUs didn’t exist, the civs would have nearly identical winrates.

1 Like