You CANNOT have a unit which ignores pierce armour without destroying balance

Age of Empires II: DE II - Discussion
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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.

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Funnily I had fun designing a custom unit for campaign purpose recently and first went down this ranged armor bypass concept. And yeah, you gotta get the base attack super low to balance this kind of unit. Like, 4 + upgrades is already way too high to me. It will probably get nerfed eventually, but I’d personally have gone with a base attack of 2 for the Castle Age version and maybe 3 for the Elite upgrade.

Now keep in mind that their bonus doesn’t count on buildings and siege units, so there are hard counters, like, SUPER hard counters. And in the end, this unit will probably be super situational, but still OP in some of these situations. Like game winning OP.

Personally, how I would have designed a composite Bowman unit, as a “Composite Archer” myself lol, would have been a unit that have two, automatically toggled, shooting mode. One at mid-long range, that shoots far distance, a low damage projectile (less damage than a regular archer) at normal speed: let’s say 3 to 6 base range (+upgrades later). The other mode would be at close range (0-3 range): the unit would immediately shoot faster, a lot faster than a normal archer, with a lot more punch too, kind of 8-10 ish base damage sort of thing. But that would be at the risk of being pounced upon in melee, so very situational.

That would reflect the main pros of a composite bow: being able to shoot on the right side and reload the arrows at lightning speed, while the siyahs provide more punch with heavier arrows at close range, piercing armor more easily than a self bow pound for pound.

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Perhaps they could nerf the bonus to: Ignores half of the pierce armor (of non-siege units)?
Then high PA from Huskarls etc. would still have some use against Composite bowmen

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This unit is quite anti-Serjeant, which, given the recent rise of the Youpudding strat, is quite funny.

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Comp bows actually don’t ignore the PA of buildings and siege so it won’t be totally OP but Armenians have Redemption + Block Printing for odd reason.

Remove redemption and then siege is a way.

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nice rant…
let’s see if you’re right with that assessment, cause for sure devs decided to go that path and i don’t think will back off now.

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Which is also true for every other archer in the game. And all those other archers units are balanced.

Yeah, this actually sounds way better. I still don’t this is a good idea, but this is at least functional.

True. But hey, I stand by my word, and I’ll eat it if there is no outcry/nerf within the like 4 months after release.

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OK, i’ll take the opposition point: I think at least the elite version will receive a buff at some point.

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Yeah that unit will break the balance so badly, they are the best archer in the game, imagine beating with ease rattan archer and inflicting tons of damage to paladins, tarkans, battle elephants, it is not only the huskarl, lots of units will be destroyed by this new unit.

If they do it fast with low hp it will be OP for fast players but if they do it slow it would have lots of HP meaning it would beat skirms in 1x1 fights, what is wrong with FE dev team? they can’t even add a new unit without breaking the OG game anymore, georgians and armenians will make look poles weak.

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Armenian Monk play looks like it is going to be fun, I would not meddle with it.

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But fun can’t be unfun for the opponent, how you counter an army of FU elite comp bows + Rams + Monks with redemption and block printing?

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I understand. I would want to play several games and get used to the rhythm before making any specific recommendations of any kind. I just think that their Monk play is going to add something to key maps, so I would not want to see that fall. They may ultimately not need balancing.

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???
FU arbs do 3 dmg to paladins and 2 dmg to eagles

Halb siege ram counters it (+cavs)
Add plumed archer/champs to deal with infantry.

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Also hand cannoner is still a thing!
Prob also can balance the archer by giving an insane cost (in particular, food)

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Sure, I’ll change that. Doesn’t change the argument though.

Nope, that’s why I added that “paired with cavalry/infantry” clause in there. Heck, the infantry alone will counter both halbs and siege rams.

But also, it’s not good to invalidate huskarls, eagles, ghulams, etc as anti-archer units.

Totally different topic, hand cannoneers and archers work totally differently, just because of accuracy and fire rate.

Not for team games, no.

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Roman UU are also much better than knights/cav, but they are balanced by having EXTREMELY long produce time.

Maybe if this archer takes e.g. 40 second to produce each, it can be balanced some how?

(Or get 3 range instead of 4, aka ranged throwing axeman)

Nah cav+archer actually countered by fast imp halb+ram rush, as you can see for Berbers (at least in solo) - For team game go for onager.

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This could work, possibly. I still don’t like training time balances. It just delays the issue, doesn’t fix the problem accross all maps and all modes.

Not cav+archer, I’m talking about infantry+archer. Armenians are an infantry civ, and they have infantry bonuses. Not just their insanely tanky healing priests, but also +30HP champions who are available right from castle age (30 extra HP only in imperial age though)

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That is true, but dont they die hard to ordinary archers in this case? (esp. with one less range)
In fact they dont get BBCs so onager+archer looks really good on paper

For TG just go onager (similar to how to deal with Italian UUs)

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“Anti anti-X X” type of units have existed since AoK. Cataphract, Chu Ko Nu, condotierro etc. They can be balanced.

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They have Monks with Redemption and Block Printing so Siege isn’t an answer really.

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