They actually really suck against Longbowmen, Plumed Archers, and Rattan Archers, so any archer with better raw stats will win.
So an arbalest civs gets a UU/monk combo to force your opponent into making skirms/archers units ? Sounds nice !
When using Georgians UU, the 9 hits kill on mangonels after a split, the 7 hit kill on scorpion after lining, and the casual 30 hits kill on rams are gonna be juicy.
I seemed from the video vs huskarls that the attack delay still allows for micro.
They seem almost underpowered.
Yeah, but they don’t ignore melee armour, do they? Do you think that gbtos or chakrams with wootz steel is fine?
Because broken in one common scenario is good enough for a unit to be counted as broken. I don’t care for arabia. A lot of other maps do go lategame, especially team games.
The rest of your argument is exclusive to open maps. I am also talking about closed maps and nomad maps.
And then deal with the warrior priest/trash frontline. I’m not talking about open maps, I’m talking about closed map/nomad games past mid-castle age. Same for burmese light cav, armenians have halbs and champions to deal with that.
Imagine an anti-archer unit. Let’s take eagles/ghulams, because that’s a solid middle ground. Once FU, they have 8 pierce armour.
Chu ko nus do 6+4=10 damage against them. However, chu ko nus have 3.89 rate of fire before thumb ring. SOURCE. Meaning, they do 10 damage in 2.91 seconds. Or, 206 damage per minute.
We know that armenian archers have a fixed 8 points of damage regardless of situation. They also have 100% accuracy and 2 rate of fire. This means 240 points of damage, and much better ability to micro.
The stats of the unit are out already. You can check it HERE.
That’s just not true. Infantry aren’t supposed to be weak to archers. 2 of them are, but that’s not a general rule. Similary, cavalry aren’t weak to infantry in general, although some people say so.
The actual exception you can point out is condottiero. However, even that has nothing to do with this argument. Janissaries still wipe the floor with condos.
Most importantly, there’s a difference between robbing a generic unit of its function, and robbing a UU of its function. A UU is supposed to be special. It’s the civ’s exclusive unit.
Another issue with armour ignoring units is that you cannot regulate them for unit HP. From this point on, you cannot rely on pierce armour to do what it’s supposed to do. Whether you are against a 30 HP unit or 150 HP unit, these units do the same DPS (except for redirection time).
This is why I call this design garbage. It’s like creating a modular kernal for a system and then making half of it monolithic. It’s like taking a jigsaw puzzle and supergluing some of the random ones together.
I tend to agree, although I think the balance aspect of the unit is overemphasized (although that is an important factor). Urumis for example, I think are a badly designed unit despite arguably being “balanced.” Mainly I just think the Composite Bowman has terrible design in the way that it trivializes so many key units, as well as overusing a gimmick that didn’t need to see any further applications. Sure, it can be made balanced in an annoying months-long process of trial and error, but that alone doesn’t make for a good design. And that process strikes me as being similar to boiling and filtering piss until it’s potable. You can do it, but why start off with something so unpalatable?
Ignoring (melee) armor for Leitis and Wootz units was mostly fine because it approximates to +3-5 damage for most matchups, so either a slightly stronger or slightly weaker version of Garland Wars. High melee armor is central to the identity of like 2 niche units in the game, so it’s okay for Leitis or Wootz units to have very lopsided interactions with them.
High pierce armor, on the other hand, is extremely common, and is one of the key hallmarks of almost any strong unit. War Wagons? Rattans? Eagles? Huskarls? Skirms? Tarkans, or almost any good cavalry unit? Being useful in their roles is highly related to their high pierce armor stats. Lacking pierce armor almost inevitably makes an otherwise strong unit bad or niche (e.g. Urumi). Enter this new unit that completely trivializes this entire dimension that is so important to the identity and usefulness of all these units. This should have been one of the obvious “no-nos” when coming up with a new UU unless you literally had no other ideas. Even giving an archer unit a charge attack would be an overuse of that mechanic, but would have been easier to balance and less annoying to face up against. If you reaaallly insisted on this kind of mechanic, it should have some kind of limitation, like ignoring X% of the enemy unit’s armor, or ignoring up to X of the enemy unit’s armor.
Everything else about the new civ designs seems tolerable enough and I think can be both balanced and fun to play with/against with some tweaks. But this, even if it comes to be balanced, I just think is fundamentally dumb. I would say this if some forumer came up with it for a civ concept, and I’ll say it when the devs add it to the game.
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I think what counts is the damage done after all calculations. I think Gbeto are very strong against many meele units, and I would dislike it if they were good against Teutonic Knights too. But Hand Canonneers exist who are good against Teutonic Knights, so it is not like there arent good ranged units against Teuntonic Knights.
And against something like Huskarls, Slingers and similar units already exist. It is a bit annoying, but it is nothing really new, and I am not convinced that the Composite Bowmen is the most problematic of these units. Chakrams were a very huge problem before they were nerfed. But it does not seem like Composite Bowmen are on that broken level. They also don’t ignore Siege piece armor, so they are not good against them like Gbeto.
Even if it is too strong at release, it seems balanceable.
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This last would be the most unusual. In MikeEmpires’s video, it looks like the broken archers could have won if they had patrolled differently (like on stand ground or something):
At 15:32 (this forum really doesn’t want me to post the timestamp link).
They have a slight numbers advantage with equal resources and do 1 more damage so kill in 6 hits while dying in 7. In real games, range matters more than in these fights, though.
I feel I must point out that Slingers do pierce damage, not normal (melee) damage. Otherwise, of course, they would probably beat skirmishers.
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I remember that there is a post asking for buff Gurjaras right on the day of the release of Indian DLC. But it turned out that Gurjaras is overwhelming. This is kinda funny.
Now, without several key info, asking for a nerf of Armenian before its release. Sarcastic…
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Becasue… those are not the same units? Gbeto, Throwing Axemen, Mameluke, and Chakrams also don’t ignore armor, they do melee damage so anything with high melee armor makes them do lower damage. Slinger has very low attack and the ‘ignoring pierce armor’ is only ever relevant if an infantry unit has high pierce armor.
Each of those units except Slinger also have low range, and aren’t affected by Ballistics.
Anyway, in my opinion 4 base damage is a lot since it also gets improved by Blacksmith techs. I think the damage needs to be lowered. Maybe they can lose Bracer.
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This unit is extremely busted, but do you know what is even more OP? The Warrior Priest. Make 10 of them and they outheal any damage, its insane.
This does not help units with low meele armor. The damage type of a unit or what armor it ignores just changes against what a unit is good against. The Composite Bowmen just has a different profile than normal pierce or meele damage ranged units. The devs just have to make sure it has strengths an weaknesses. But that a unique unit has such a unique profil is kinda cool imo.
I would suggest to lower the damage to 3, remove the +2 attack bonus against Skirmishers, but let it ignore armor of siege weapons too. But maybe first we should see how good it is in actual games. What may be very strong about it, is, how good it scales into the late game. That is why the Elite upgrade is rather a joke that does not seem worth to research.
Oh, they don’t indeed.
If they are weak to siege and archers, then most civs have tools
Yeah, the unit is easy to balance. It can receive nerf on properties like attack delay, movement speed (deadly vs mangonels), accuracy (no thumb rings), damage, range, etc…
I don’t think there is an inherit problem with an Archer that ignores armour, the problem seems that this unit is just too strong.
They counter almost everything that is not siege, even winning without micro or a meat shield and Warrior Priests seem to be the perfect meat shield kinda unit.
Removing Bracer from their techtree would make this Archer less oppressively strong and it would also change the strange fact that they have one of the very best Galleons in the game.
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If only Armenians had good monks and Skirmishers!
Honestly I’m sure that devs intentionally (didn’t they confirm this?) overtune new civs so that people would play them more, and then nerf them. Them getting Bracer seems to be almost intentional since they have a tech that gives their Galley-line +1 range, so that later on they can just remove it.
A relatively slow archer unit with 6 range that ignores armor seems a little more balanced overall, so if they don’t lose Bracer I’ll be very surprised.
Yes, and in the case of Composite Bowmen, armor altogether does not matter. The concept of the unit isn’t bad, but the way it is right now is overpowered. They still seem weak to Skirmishers at least, but they have several options to deal with Skirmishers as well.
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It is impossible to release a new civ perfectly balanced.
So I think they rather have it a little too strong then a little too weak.
Not sure if that’s the better way of doing it.
In theory the counter to a armor pircing unit would ba a high health unit with no armor.
But I think the problem here is that every unit gets +2 armor in the castle age via the blacksmith, and the unit has only one less damage than Crossbows. So it is basically better against everything compared to Crossbows.
It reminds me a bit of Urumi swordsmen who have just much more damage than comparable units. And Urumis actually also beat Composite Bowmen convincingly without micro, not just barely like Huskarls. But somehow Dravaidians are not as broken as the UU implies. So we have to see how it works out in actual games. But in theory the base damage of Composite Bowmen should be lowered.
The problem there is that armenians are a monk heavy civ. On top of having all the upgrades, you also have an incentive to create monasteries everywhere. They are a defensive building, and also makes your warrior priest units.
But also, multiplayer games.
Yeah, it does feel that way. I don’t know what nerf they will recieve, but I suspect that it will be losing bracer, change in fire rate/target rate, or reduction to base damage.
When they released DoI, 2 civs were OP, and 2 were underpowered. This time, it feels like all 3 are OP.
Yeah, but that’s because urumis are only good on paper. Melee and ranged units work totally differntly. You need to replenish melee units way more often than ranged units, and urumis are expensive and fragile.
The problem is that it does fixed damage to all units. One of these units will do 8 damage to ANY unit. If you lower it to, say, 6, it will do 6 to ANY unit. This makes it exceptionally hard to work with, since pierce armour is such an important part of this game.
Maybe they planned to make all of them slightly better then average but failed at 2 of them.
Completely ignoring armour on all Infantry and Cavalry is a very strong bonus on paper for example but didn’t end out to be that powerful.
It’s often hard to know how powerful things will be in practice because in the actual match there are a lot of other things that play a role in how effective units are.
One could argue that this makes it actually more predictable and easier to work with. It is not like a 1 damage change results in a drop of 4 to 3 damage (25%) against one unit but in a drop from 2 to 1 (50%) against a different unit. For example Malay lost Gambesons probably because of the extreme change against Skrimishers in particular, not because it was overall to strong. This exact problem will not be there for Composite Bowman.
But the problem I see is that they have fix 2 more effective damage in Imperial age than in Castle age, while the Archer line does only 1 more effective damage. So balancing the strength in Castle age versus Imperial age could be a problem. The devs try to fix it with a weak Elite upgrade, but if the damage of the unit is nerfed the problem will get worse.
True. I didnt mean they are easy to counter. Just that there are more tools to use against them.
I agree that they are still overpowered.
I personally wouldnt mind nerfing the unit to the ground. A useless unit is never a problen for me, whereas an overpowered unit is a problem.
And as the unit still does a lot of damage, this can still be balanced by making it unbearable to micro (e.g. 1.5s attack delay, 0.65 movement speed, or 6s attack reload time)
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