I just learned about the armenian UU, which ignores pierce armour. We have more than a few units that ignore melee armour in the game, why not pierce armour? You can’t do that, because pierce armour scales significantly differently to melee armour.
So, let’s take one of the more extreme situation situations, a team game with goths and and archer civ on one side and armenians and another cavalry/infantry civ on the other. By late game, the armenian UU (I’ll just call them broken archers from now) will do a guaranteed 8 damage against any unit. This means around 20 of them will one-shot almost any unit (except elephants). On the opposite side, even FU arbs will only do 3 damage to paladins, 2 to eagles, and 1 to huskarls. Meaning, the armenian archers will always chew through the opponent’s front line quicker than the opponent’s arb line.
+1 pierce armour is such a big a deal that they added gambersons as a new tech into the game for infantry. While nice, +1 melee armour is not even remotely close to that. This is not a small difference. This unit will extremely hard to beat in team games. Just think about how important the crossbow-knight meta is in the game. Now, add a tech that gives crossbows +4 damage. How well do you think that would go?
The fundamental problem with this mechanic is that one of these units will do fixed damage to all units. This isn’t such a huge problem in melee, because of how pathing works. Units cannot engage with each other at will, and melee armour ignoring is functionally equal to +3-+5 damage in most cases.
To illustrate this, let’s take the main methods of countering arrow damage. That’s pierce armour, speed, and tankiness. Elite eagles have only 60 HP, but they compensate for it with 2 extra pierce armour. Those 2 extra pierce armour means 10-20 extra archers needed to one-shot them. On the other hand, Knights have only 2 base pierce armour, but 120 HP. For most archers, these 2 things are analogous. For this unit though, higher pierce armour is irrelevant. Meaning, tankiness is the only thing that counters them (in melee). This is not just a problem now, it will be a problem every single time a new anti-archer unit is introduced into the game. This unit removes one of the most important design aspects of the game. And for what, exactly?
The only way to balance such a unit is either to reduce the attack rate drastically, reduce their pierce damage to 1/2, and remove bracer. They should also probably have like 20 HP to get one-shotted by cavalry.
MAYANS AND BURMESE CANNOT COUNTER THIS UNIT, especially when they are paired with cavalry/infantry. Skirms are the only viable counter, but a front line meat shield will easily stop that. 13 of these archers will one-shot a fully upgraded mayan eagle. If you have a reasonable mass of 40, mayan eagles stand absolutely no chance.
Here’s the unit destroying elite huskarl, when microed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHegRV7z9Qg
The strength of archers, and pierce armour is inherently linked to the front line units. This unit crushes that balance.
Mark my words, this unit will either be heavily nerfed, or people will stop playing the game just because of this. I know that I might just resign the game upon seeing people play armenians, because that’s how broken this unit is. And once it is nerfed, I will be mocking the people who designed this @#!& as often as I can, afterwards.