Why PA is important while low base atk isnt? Why accuracy is important while rof/ range isnt?
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Speculation can be wrong. Suggestion based on wrong speculation is terrible.
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Its not that people didn’t take a note. Its just that most of it is your own assumption. “Ignore armor” is just another fancy name for more dps. -1 attack on non-elites and elites, +0.5 reload time, -1 range, -0.1 speed, +10 gold, +20s training time. Soooo many ways to balance it. And ROF matters A LOT. Higher the ROF, better the unit scales with numbers. Gunpowder units like hand canons, conqs do more “pierce” damage to any unit than what this unit does. But they all have lower rof, base accuracy and are not considered broken.
They are “ranged”, that’s the argument. An archer is just a ranged unit. “Range” is the fundamental advantage. When you have lots of units, all of them can target fire at once on a single unit from a distance, attack units behind the walls, hit and run etc. That’s the purpose of “range’”.
You’re just hanging on to “archer” and “pierce”. Archer is just an armor class. Usually ranged units do “pierce” damage but most units that are meant to handle ranged units have good pierce armor. Since gbeto, chakram are ranged but do melee damage, some of those units can’t be used effectively. This is the reason why he questions why not those units.
He’s saying that hand canoneers still do “enough” damage to those “high pierce armor” units even though they’re supposed to be strong against ranged units. And this type of “exceptions” are always present.
And to put it in summary, whether a unit is problematic or not needs to be seen from how they stand with respect to the civ’s tech tree. The unit just feels like a hand canoneer replacement for that civ. Tech tree doesn’t force high pierce armor units against this civ. It has imperial age infantry in castle age and a self-healing infantry uu from a cheap building. This means it doesn’t drive other civs to use high p.armor infantry or cavalry units against it but rather archers, anti infantry units, gunpowder or something like scorps considering this civ doesn’t have canons or siege engineers. This unit isn’t a natural counter to such units. So it doesn’t fill the hole for the civ either. Considering all of these its not going to be broken. Nor is the mechanic broken. Its just a different way of creating a high dps ranged unit.
Speaking of these and other hidden stats, the PUP is live, meaning the unit stats can be observed in AGE. Here’s what we have for its hidden stats (looking at Elite).
+2 vs spearline (+3 for Arb)
Speed: 0.96 (Same as Arb)
Reload Time: 2.0 (Same as Arb with no TR)
Frame Delay: 12 (20 for Arbs) - Although how well this translates to attack delay depends on how many frames the unit has. In practice the attack delay looks very slightly slower for the CompBow than for Arb
Train Time: 10 Seconds
So not only does it not have the hidden disadvantages some people were expecting (I don’t know where assuming the fire rate was similar to a hand cannoneer came from), but it has an extremely low training time. Versus 18 seconds for Elite Longbows or 27 for Arbs.
So yeah, definitely gonna need some nerfs.
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No? That’s factually not true in the game
You can extend the logic, but there are some pretty big differences. For example, none of the melee ranged units get increased range with blacksmith upgrades. They aren’t countered by skirms, and other anti-archer units.
But also, are mangonels and scorpions archers now? Trebs? BBC? Your take is wild, man.
No, ignore armour is not just more DPS. I have made my point clear like 5 times already. If the unit does 240 damage per minute, that’s 240 damage against all units. The problem is not just about nerfing the unit, it’s about nerfing it to a level where it is not underpowered.
Also, this point has been addressed multiple times already. If you want to argue, respond to the rebuttals.
Again, they don’t negate pierce armour. If they didn’t have a bonus against infantry, huskarls would wipe the floor with them. Tarkans still destroy HCs. So do sicilian cavalier. Pierce armour matters against HC. In fact, pierce armour is extremely important, because of the misfires. Misfires do half damage, and pierce armours protect against that.
I said that I don’t like kamayuk-cata balance, never said it was broken. I am saying that broken archers are just that, broken.
I try to be precise with my words. If you want to make an argument, please don’t nitpick. Address the meat of the argument.
Oh, my bad. Base attack is indeed a way to balance the unit. I said that in the original post.
You have some flexibility with the range, but not a lot. ROF doesn’t address the issue at all. Again, I’m not just trying to nerf the unit to the ground so that it’s useless. I’m trying to balance it such that it is neither underpowered nor overpowered. The unit should also be fun to use.
Low rate of fire is an inferior version of low base damage for this archer. That’s because high pierce armour will negate a lot of damage, and thus, low base damage units high rate of fire (or multiple arrows, or bonus damage) to compensate. That isn’t an issue for this unit.
Some of us like to speculate and make theories.
If you think this is pointless, I have good news for you; you don’t have to participate. There are other threads you might find more enjoyable.
Wow. Just wow.
Okay, at this point, I might as well just take any random redditor’s balance suggestions.
I had a lot of respect for the balance team. The first Bohemian monastery nerf was a thing of beauty. How did this thing ever make it to public release?
You already can in the PUP. Remains to be seen how it plays out within the eco of the civ and in inter-civ matchups, but I don’t think we need 3 months to come to a basic consensus of how strong the unit is.
Just did a few quick tests with them (never bothered with the MikeEmpires videos) and with a little micro they do seem to wreck comparable res worth of skirms and even knights hard enough to usually make that a bad fight for the enemy. In a real game I’d expect the enemy to have something of a numbers advantage if you’re going for a UU, but with the lower TT of the Compbow, I think their UU play will be fairly viable. Generic archers look to be a pretty soft counter. Their only hard counters ATM seem to be siege and archers with significantly greater range and speed (e.g. Plumes, Brit Archers, possibly Rattans).
I’ll admit it initially seems kind of fun to have a unit that’s worth microing vs traditional archer counters and isn’t really afraid of anything that can meaningfully chase it down (and it looks cool), but it’s definitely overtuned.
By ranged, I meant functionally. Like how you use those ranged units for raids for low investment or against melee or for pushing as a main army. If you’re still unable to understand - the old and new Mamelukes. The old ones took damage from skirms, the new ones don’t but functionally they are the same. An anti-cavalry ranged unit. You can hit and kill melee units before they reach you. You can snipe siege even if opponent builds around it, you can kill a repair villager behind the house wall. These are FUNCTIONAL. Not for the exact upgrade it requires. Not doing a point by point comparison and saying that all ranged units are exactly identical. A utility comparison. This is the main purpose of doing ranged units instead of melee alternatives.
It is DPS. Whether you try to make it fancier with 240 per minute or 14400 per hour or whatever arbitrary scale you multiply. And that type of a multiplier isn’t even valid practically. Some of it is going to go waste because of inaccuracy and the lack of thumb ring, some of it is going to result in overkill. Ultimately its going to scale worse in numbers than units like Mangudai or chakrams.
Again get the gist of what we’re saying. Its ultimately 8 damage per projectile. If you’re unable to understand because of the feeling that 17 is still low and you want to argue this way, take Burgundian canoneers, Elite Janissaries. Its 14 damage per projectile against Elite Tarkan. Its 300 damage per minute, its 18000 damage per hour. Instead of coming up with some niche unit that might receive more damage from 1 composite bowman, try to understand that gunpowders are also units that deal a lot of damage than regular ranged units against MOST of the units. That’s precisely the point why damage per projectile isn’t sufficient to imply that a unit is broken.
This unit is going to misfire as well. It doesn’t have 100% default accuracy and lacks thumb ring. And even if you do all armor upgrades, they take 9, 10 or 14 damage from elite gunpowder units. Why is it so hard to see that the damage done per projectile is higher for a gunpowder unit even after all the upgrades compared to this unit.?
What is this “if they didn’t” argument. But they do get the bonus. And they do deal a ton of damage.
In low numbers per projectile damage output is more important and in large numbers ROF is better. Against majority of the units, Mangudais are still going to be the better unit compared to this one. So just stop saying ROF doesn’t address the issue. If this unit is set to have a reload time of 5, it becomes a complete garbage unit. So ROF does matter.
Low rate of fire is inferior to lower base damage in smaller numbers and superior in higher numbers. And that’s because of overkill.
Range will have huge impact for slow, fragile ranged units. ROF is also quite important in larger numbers. Again if you can see that there’s a possibility of overnerfing this unit to the ground so that its useless, you can also see that its possible to adjust the numerics to balance it out.
10 second ## ## insanely low. I think training time should be atleast 20 for non-elites and something like 16 or 17 for elites, frame delay/attack animation delay should be higher to lower micro potential or speed should be lower and most importantly they should lose the +2 vs spearline and not get any extra bonuses. Or the cost should be significantly higher.
Anyways I think they’re doing the same marketing thing, open with very strong stats and nerf later. Like Chakrams.
They do have 100% accuracy. If they had 75% accuracy like HCs, I still wouldn’t by happy, but it would be way more balanced.
This changes nothing about my argument.
Do you want to bet money that this thing will do more damage than HC at long ranges, against high armour targets? Damage per projectile for HCs might be higher, but they have significantly lower accuracy, and significantly lower fire rate.
The “if they didn’t” argument is to highlight the importance of bonus damage. If the broken archers had bonus damage against cavalry or infantry, I wouldn’t be complaining.
I am not going to repeat myself, because I have done it 3 times already. You cannot buff this unit, but you can nerf it.
This unit is the equivalent of the statement “this statement is false”. It is the equivalent of the equation, x = x+1, x is a real number. There is no mid-point, there is no solution.
It follows the logic:
- BA is as good as/slightly weaker than crossbow line against melee cavalry (and high-HP units) => BA is good against low HP melee units
- BA is good against low HP (like champions) melee units => they are good against their infantry counter units
- BA is good against low HP units => they are good against skirms and archers, as long something can soak up the arrow fire in front
- BA is good against cavalry => they are always better at killing the front line arrow-soaking units than any other archer
The only solution here is to make them garbage against cavalry. Meaning, drastically cut down base damage/rof/whatever else. But that also means nerfing them to the ground.
They don’t. No archer unit does. The stats are getting updated. Two days ago there was no training time, frame delay, attack delay, projectile speed. Now those are added.
That’s because you still probably don’t understand the gist of argument. Let me reiterate. You were overamplifying the strength of this unit by talking about how much damage it would do against high p.armor units like ghulam, huskarl and eagles. The point @AriesXBox90 made here is that the concept of “infantry countering archers” itself is problematic. Archers are made to kill cheap infantry or camels but if those civs pivot and make an infantry unit that kills the archers, how can archer civs handle that? Why or how has that not been perceived as a game breaking mechanic or problem?
Second thing is questioning why overhype a ranged unit countering high p.armor units (ones perceived as anti-ranged unit) when there are units like Slingers, chakrams, gbeto against tanky infantry like Ghulam, eagles and huskarls. What can Hindustanis do vs eagles and slingers? What can goths do vs shrivamsha riders+ chakrams?
Or Genoese, Mameluke against cavalry units. What can Huns do vs Mamelukes? What can Magyars do vs Genoese? The theory of some high dps ranged unit countering everything a particular civ can produce already exists and yet in practice it hasn’t made those units broken or unstoppable.
The reply you gave is that this archer is “broken” (except siege) and “as long as there’s some front line” it will kill everything else. When you have a civ without +4 on cav, your front line is halbs or the other infantry uu. In that case, why won’t other civ go for their own ranged units with a front line plus something like scorps or canons or some other siege? Why ignore the siege part? In that case there’s a higher probability of you taking the worse trade in an engagement. Why would you pick the exception of having extra units in favor of your argument that this unit is broken but ignore the same for opposite.?
Depends on a lot of things here. What is considered as “high” armour? What is the volume of units? What age/stage of the game are you considering? How are you making the comparison - like a practical game where both units have been produced and are taking a fight in the presence of other melee units or like MikeEmpires video, just a meaningless equal gold cost comparison?
I can see Paladin, Tarkans, Savars, eagles and huskarls dying sooner to this unit than to Janissaries (Paladin maybe a 50-50) but that’s not the point. No one is arguing that gunpowder or some other unit kills another high p.armor unit faster than this unit does. Maybe it does kill a few units sooner but it doesn’t mean it destroys game balance.
Instead of going like “oh you want to bet…this unit is more broken against unit x or unit y” try to understand the opposite view. Sparing a few, majority of the units in the game take a lot of damage when up against a big mass of gunpowder units. Which means most of the units can’t and shouldn’t directly engage against a big group of gunpowder units. This unit is going to get the same treatment in such a situation.
High damage output castle unit that shouldn’t be directly engaged without siege.
Or in other words, you don’t want to hear anything other than “Sir yes sir, I agree, you’re 100% right. This unit is ridiculous and broken and no one can play against this civ and unit, it has to be changed completely before release”
Except its not. Its just your interpretation. In general its not 1-dimensional.
Unit has stats x1, x2, x3,… (like attack, armor, hp, training time, speed, rof, cost) etc. You’ve mentioned it yourself if some of it is changed a lot, it becomes overnerfed to the point where its useless. Which simply means there’s some middle ground where it could be balanced even if its currently not. (Assuming it currently won’t be) You’re simply focused fully on damage output against high pierce armor units alone while there are several other things important for a unit’s usability. Tweaking one or more of that can balance this out making it less versatile.
Units like champions are not their counters. Siege and other high rof ranged units are.
“As long as something can soak up the arrow”, logic extends to the opposing player, they can have rams in front or make use of siege units. Especially because this civ lacks plate barding armor, has no canons or siege engineers.
Stop being disingenous. I didn’t say that champions are their counters.
I said that they counter everything, or they counter just low HP units. That is fundamentally unbalanced. Siege is not included in this equation, but they have redemption monks to handle that.
And armenians have redemption monks which just convert those siege units.
Also, team games. Supporting player can just bring ## #### Forward rams will die to supporting cavalry.
Wrong. Cavalry can easily engage gunpowder units en masse, as long as you also have an equivalent mass of cavalry.
The rest of your statement is just a dodge.
“No one is arguing that gunpowder or some other unit kills another high p.armor unit faster than this unit does”
Are you for real? The entire argument you guys are making is that this thing is comparable to gunpowder. Meaning, HCs and these are roughly equivalent. Meaning, HCs will kill all units at a rate roughly equal to, or better than, this unit
No, I want you to address the argument that has been given, which you keep dodging.
This is the core of the argument:
All that ranged melee damage and everything else are side tangents. Address this properly.
I am currently of the impression that the Georgians have the more dangerous unit. I could be wrong, but it is an instinct.
they still need the armor for skirmishers when they already have no Thunb Ring, don’t they?
Let’s make a poll
Will Armenians (with the Composite Bowman and Warrior Priest) be a top-tier pick in tournaments if they receive no further changes?
- Yes
- No
0
voters
How often do you expect Armenians in early Imperial Age to have Composite Bowmen as one of the main parts of their army in 1v1 expert games?
- 0~25% of the time
- 25~50% of the time
- 50~75% of the time
- 75~100% of the time
0
voters
How often do you expect Armenians in Imperial Age to have Composite Bowmen as one of the main parts of their army in 4v4 Rage Forest?
- 0~25% of the time
- 25~50% of the time
- 50~75% of the time
- 75~100% of the time
0
voters
Do you think Composite Bowmen will be a fun unit?
- Fun to play with, and fun to play against!
- Not fun to play against, but fun when you have them!
- Not fun to play, but fun to play against!
- Not a fun unit for either player
0
voters
Forum filter: Fun to #### ##### ### not fun to play against!
Open map team games, its a slow civ and will die to a dozen other archer flanks. Closed map team games, there’s going to be ballistas, houfnice, siege onager etc. If your ally brings cavalry, the opponent’s ally will obviously have their own units.
It does not counter everything. The repeated argument you’re making is “if there are front lines”, “if there are redemption monks”. And having all of those is not easy for a slow paced civ on most maps and settings. Very niche matchups and settings.
And canons aren’t like impossible to use because of redemption monks. One or two unprotected canons will get converted but otherwise canons have higher range and monks can get sniped by skirmishers or other ranged units which are good against this civ. Monks just don’t counter canons and make canon civs useless.
Everyone produces canons despite redemption monks. You can’t micro dozens of monks at that stage of the game where you have fully upgraded castle units, trebs, some front line units etc. In an even game you need your own canons to handle enemy canons
If opponent has 50+ gunpowder units and you have an equivalent number of cavalry units to engage and get the better outcome despite the opponent kiting their units, approximately the same outcome is achievable against this unit as well. You might lose a few more but you can kill it. And suppose if you are losing even more, the hp or armor of this unit could be adjusted to make it die faster to have a similar outcome. If the cost effectiveness is the problem, cost could be increased. If the rate at which its massed again is high, its training time could be increased. Meaning its not unbalance-able.
“EQUIVALENT” and “COMPARABLE” not “BETTER”. Why would you ask if I want to bet if gunpowder does more damage to some niche units? You were just trying to find a niche scenario where this unit does more damage than gunpowder to potray its broken. Stop doing that and look at the types of units in the game. Majority of the units have 4,5 or 6 p.armor and the damage dealt by gunpowder unique units is quite close or better than this unit. Units with 7 or 8 p.armor, it would be slightly higher and will depend a lot on projectile distribution. Overall one or two units apart the damage done by this unit will be about the same as gunpowder unique units.
How am I even dodging. I’ve exactly answered that part. Its just your imagination and assumption. Just like how teutonic knight lovers assumed urumi swordsmen and wootz steel are broken even before the DLC came out. I’m just directly replying to you saying that this unit is still going to die to skirms, other ranged units. Plenty of civs can just win by preventing the unit from being massed or pushing out from different sides to exploit the mobility. In a CBA scenario, if a hundred composite bows spawned automatically, maybe its broken. Otherwise its not. Its a poor fit for the civ, a lazy design, could counter units which are usually good against archers but it doesn’t DESTROY BALANCE or anything.
You didn’t. I gave a structured argument. There are two ways of countering those. One, you need to show that the axioms/assumptions are wrong. Two, you need to show that the way I have used my reasoning is incorrect. You have done neither.
If you understood my argument and disagreed with it, that would be cool. However, that’s not the impression I’ve gotten from your comments so far.
You know what, just wait for 4 months. Play against the unit for a while. We can have this discussion once you have enough experience playing against them.
And hey, maybe I’m wrong and they find some genius to fine tune the parameters of this thing. However, even that doesn’t will not address the fundamental design abomination that this unit is.
I did by comparing with units with similar damage output and are functionally similar.
I did understand and I can see why as well. Your impression is if a TG flank goes for this unit what will the other team’s flank and pocket do. Or in general in a team game if this unit is used in conjunction with a bunch of other units, how the high dps can be countered. A valid concern, might need a nerf but its not impossible to balance.
Precisely the point many of us have been making. Why hype it up even before playing 1 game with the unit?
Sure they would. OG Chakram, OG Arambai were good examples. Even the organ guns from a few months ago.
So go find another thread. I am not forcing you to make any point here.
This statement is why I know why you don’t understand my argument. I consider you to be intelliegent, so if you understood my argument, you wouldn’t be saying this.
Or you know what, prove wrong. Tell me what my argument is.
This comment is also just false. HCs aren’t comparable. Go and test it, you’ll realize why.
No. They’ll nerf it to hell eventually, and we’ll have another fairly useless UU.
Why should I? This is an open discussion forum. If you post something, people are free to express their opinion about it. And since its something about balance and a new unit, I’m interested in it.
Let me summarize the thread:
Your first argument was an explanation of what happens if crossbows get +4. And more explanation on how broken that is. Which I agree is a huge problem for a unit like crossbow that’s available from archery range. But that’s invalid for this uu because its not a unit available from the archery range. It needs castles.
Second you were presenting how pierce damaging units are countered by elaborating the stats of eagles and knights and how this unit by ignoring the pierce armor breaks the design. For that @GermanAttorney8 mentioned gunpowder units dealing significantly higher damage to eagles, about how production can be balanced through training time with the example of Roman uu etc, how the civ’s infantry-composite bowman combo can be countered just by generic ranged units and siege, similarity to chukonus.
@FurtherLime7936 also explained how you can still keep the balance by removing redemption similar to Chinese.
Instead of seeing the purpose of a ranged unit from castle being used over generic ones and how by those means the unit can be balanced even if its stronger than usual now, you started pointing out the niches like huskarl where composite bowman might deal more damage than chukonus. Even though chukonus were just used as a comparison to point out that there exist archer units from castle which might deal significantly higher damage than generic archers to melee units.
People kept adding more ranged units to this list to try to make you understand that several ranged castle units produced instead of archers or CA deal much higher damage to melee units that are considered “tanky” against ranged attack and still remain well balanced. But you failed to see the point that this unit can have the mechanic (which might not be unique or innovative) and still get balanced even if its not balanced right away at the time of release.
Because of ROF and accuracy, properties of a ranged unit. If this unit has 3.45 rof and 75% base accuracy, it will be a worse variant of hand canoneer that shoots an arrow instead of a bullet. For a civ without thumbring, these can be adjusted for balance purpose as well. That’s one way to balance implying that the unit is not impossible to balance.
Its quite possible that they get overnerfed. Happened to lancers, kipchaks, and once upon a time to war wagons. But eventually they’ll find an equilibrium.
Armenians have strong Infantry and Monks. So nerfing the unique Archers against Cavalry, wouldn’t hurt them that much. The Armenian weakness rather seem to be enemy Archers. Because of that it is a bit of a questionable choice to give the Composite Bowmen meele armor instead of pierce armor. If the Armenians want something good against Infantry/Cavalry they can just make Infantry with unit upgrades one age earlier. But enemy Archers are the weakness and Composite Bowmen don’t really fix the problem. Even if they do more damage against Archers then Archers to them, they have 1 less range, so it is probably not really a counter to Archers. Maybe Composite Bowmen are allowed to be op because they have not much synergy with Armenian Infantry.
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