[Anonymous Player]

I think the only way to make this work is to make infantry more expensive to produce.

E.g.

make longswords 12s, give skirms a 0.5f/0.5g cost increase, and make pikes and light cav have a lower capital cost relative to other units.

You’d have to be careful about how you do this and the exact amounts but I think it’s possible to make a case where this would be beneficial.

[anon642_]

Decent post but a bit too click baity/misleading – it took you way too long to get to the point that the training time should be even shorter than it is.

*I’ve been looking for good justifications about why pikes and light cav are so expensive to produce relative to non-trash + skirms (which aren’t an outlier) and I haven’t been able to come up with one.*

~~Thinking about it given the insight from your post, light cav should be given a production boost.~~ Actually no, b/c it will f with the arena meta too much (light cav is already the dominant strat, a buff will further reduce variety).

They are also 3 civs with fairly significant castle age light cav bonuses so tweaking LC might not be the best.

It’s fine to not see LC in castle age too often imo.

Re: pikes, they aren’t really as much of an outlier as light cav looking at your figures.

You see players go for pikes relatively often, and they are a stronger unit than skirms.

[awkwardcartography]

One idea I’ve seen floated around about why trash counter units have such a high barrier to entry in castle age is to encourage offensive plays in castle age.

The defender already has so many other advantages that making counter units easy to get rolling would just make every castle age a boomfest

[Tobotimus]

Awesome post, and you gave me some new ways to think about relative unit strength, with some actual numbers to back it up.

One thing I’ll say: I think you could word your main point (in bold) slightly differently to get your point across.

Saying that the “Longsword’s [relatively short] training time is unambiguously a detriment” will ring bells in people’s minds because it sounds nonsensical.

Of course, if you had the choice between two units with the same stats, same cost, same CapEx, but different training times, you would always choose the one with the shorter training time, because this is unambiguously an advantage (all other things being equal).

But what you’re trying to say is that training time does not give you the full picture regarding how easy a unit is to mass into an army which beats most other castle-age units.

[Team_Spirit]

Never understood why they didn’t train in like 15 seconds, 2 longswordsmen = 1 knight, afterall.

[total_score2]

What a fantastic post, well done.

One thing I’d add is maybe monks and CA to that table, units that are known for being bottlenecked by production and capital costs respectively, to provide even more contrast.

[L0has]

good analysis.

Lowering the militia-lines training time seems to me like a good way to buff them without breaking the early game balance, as it only starts to have an effect when many units are produced.

Maybe have the longsword upgrade reduce training time, like crossbow upgrade does.

To buff late feudal m@a pushes or early castle age timings, supplies could also get the effect of reducing the training time.

This would also not buff goths, so no problem of creating an outlier here.

I think LS and supplies could each give -3 seconds to production time.

[Umdeuter]

Yes, it should be faster if the unit won’t be buffed in another way

[csgonemes1s]

Wow you put a lot of effort there

[Sam_Sanister]

There’s also gold cost to factor in; Miltia-line being 55 gold cheaper than Knight-line means after upgrades kick in you can have less vils on gold and more on wood/food to maintain production.

Also while you never see them, Gurjara get 30F 20G longswords after the UT+Supplies, making them very spammable.

[let_me_be_franks]

Excellent and well reasoned write-up.

Add it to the list of failings for the poor swordsman line.

I think the single most problematic thing for the swordsman line is baked into the way ranged units operate. 40 archers can concentrate all of their attack on any opposing unit with laser accuracy, meanwhile 40 swordsmen can hardly stop bumping into each other to even land a single strike.

But changing the accuracy, movement speed, or firing rate of archers to benefit swordsmen is out of the question – there has to be a way to buff swordsmen that doesn’t imbalance other unit interactions.

All three of the barracks technologies, Supplies, Squires and Arson are so underwhelming.

I really think they should just be given the Tracking treatment and applied automatically in the Feudal Age!

Supplies is a good band-aid and kudos to those who realized that the food cost of the unit was way too high, but spending food and gold to save on food in the early game feels horrible – not to mention the problem of not being able to start producing this unit (which you have shown produces too slowly already) before researching this tech.

You can have a perfectly effective army of cavalry or archers and then research Bloodlines or Thumb Ring while you’re en route to the enemy – not so with Supplies.

It’s fine for unique techs like Szlachta Privileges or Corvinian Army to put you in the hole, but for a basic tech for the most basic unit line to do the same is absurd.

Unlike Husbandry, which makes a fast unit faster, Squires just makes a slow unit a little less slow.

And Arson…

again, props to whoever realized that the only thing in the game the swordsman line can effectively counter is a non-moving combatant, but having to research a technology which makes your sole use case a little better is again, absurd…

imagine having to research “Long Sticks” before pikemen could deal bonus damage to cavalry, or “Big Rocks” before a trebuchet would be effective against a castle.

So, the up-front cost of the unit is too high.

But the real failure is the fact the the unit really has no good niche except for being good against buildings.

And they’re not even that much better than knights or archers in this regard, since enough knights can still break their way in if needed, and archers can prevent re-walling.

After a reduction to its cost, what is needed is a reimagining of the swordsman line as primarily a siege and raiding unit.

This is not the unit you want in an open field of battle, this is the unit you want when you need to punch a hole into the enemy’s defenses.

A slow moving unit which can be countered by cav, archers, or siege, but which nevertheless demands to be countered by something, anything.

More pierce armor is definitely needed – the Malian infantry bonus is by far the best, after the Gothic one – and since swordsmen can’t close the distance with archers, they should at least be able to chase them off.

Maybe an attack bonus to archers…

But I’d sooner give them an attack bonus to houses, building foundations and villagers.

Swordsmen should absolutely shred villagers if they’re allowed to get close, and they should be able to protect rams from villagers effectively. (Rams suck because the units you can garrison into rams suck.)

[J0rdian]

I always found it insane people thought militia line trained fast.

People really don’t consider resource cost, so weird.

[peeking_duck4]

is really cool and all, its interesting we’ve been saying for over 2 years the food cost on militia line is too high (you havent done the math on this properly due to maintenance cost vs upfront investment) and the tt is likely too long.

we know from eagles that wood investment into rax (to compensate for slow tt) is not the real issue

eagles.

that wood cost is deceptive.

they only need rax(relative to knight/elephant), and the wood investment does not need replacing.

the game doesnt revolve around a single w investment and then you just keep getting units.

>Elephants capital costs are only slightly higher than knights (which makes the recent food nerf cost very suspect in terms of solving the wrong problem)

but my gripe is that you think elephant f cost is not the issue

elephants, need a rax, which ups that w investment, then they need those farms replaced, which needs more vils, both on wood and working those farms

i dont know the math behind it, but this cant be right.

i dont know what you are factoring that somehow these are remotely similar.

there’s no way you can mass equal “power” of elephants to knights.

in the same way we could intuit that gurj free food was OP on release without knowing the exact math

oh wait, there it is… 6 more farms.

with associated food cost for vils working farms, with associated food cost for vils chopping wood.

the time it takes to train those vils.

i know its probably not as high as a 7 vil deficit, due to gold, but there’s no way they are as similar as you make out.

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