The Purpose of Champions
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In most situations, I prefer to choose a different gold unit instead of creating Champions.Even under equal resources, Champions can lose to Halberdier and Hussar, making them an ineffective choice.
If you have plenty of gold and your opponent is only using trash units, then creating any other gold unit army could lead to victory.
Although Champions may be useful against Eagle Warrior civilizations, they can still be challenging to use effectively, as eagles move faster and Champions get countered by most units that are typically combined with Eagle Warriors, making the knight-line or even just a group of halbs or light cavalry a better option.
The only exception might be Goths and Malay due to their bonuses, along with Malians, Vikings, Japanese, and Burmese, although they pay full price.
Bulgarians get the Two Handed Swordsman upgrades for free, which is useful for a man-at-arms rush, but there is no discounted or stronger Champion, meaning they should stop producing them later on.
In general, it seems like Champion units are a trap for inexperienced players.
Champion line is completely underrated.
Militia are the only units available in the dark age.
Drush can win games, and some civs go drush more often than they do not, like Lithuanians and Aztecs.
M@a openings in feudal are the fastest possible opening besides militia drush.
You usually do not create that many, but the immediacy of them puts your opponent on the defensive.
If you can scout out that they are going archers to counter, it is gg when you switch into scouts w/ chain armor or skirms.
You can usually wall your own base while keeping your opponents open, deny berries or gold, and destroy houses, blacksmith, lumber camps, etc.
Only Hindustani scouts and Saracen archers are really capable of this.
Long Swordsmen are admittedly not very useful.
Some civs, like Bulgarians, can combine LS with their cavalry to counter pikes, monks and camels.
Good against eagles too.
2HS/Champions are good to tech switch into for certain civs, especially those with siege onagers.
Halbs + champ + SO/BBC is very effective against all but BBC.
Aztecs, Bulgarians, celts, Dravidians, Koreans, Malians, Slavs, teutons.
Halbs + SO/BBC is not as effective as champ + halbs + so/BBC and there is no reason for most civs with both available to exclude champs from this comp.
IMO it should be a surprise factor.
For example, if your opponent is going eagle+pike against your cav, you can surprise them with militia line if you hide it.
There should be a surprise factor, otherwise they are too easy to counter if your opponent is expecting them.
Main gold units, arch and cav, destroy them, so there should be a special case where your opponent isn’t going for neither of them.
But even then, as I said, they are too easy to counter unless you have bonuses like Malians having extra piece armour.
Archer civs counter them, well…
naturally.
And most cav civs have access to tools to counter them: Hindustanis, Gurjaras, Franks, Spanish, Burgundians all have HCs to counter champions or some even have great UUs like throwing axeman or conqs to decimate champs.
One time it worked for me was I was Ethiopians vs Aztecs and my opponent was going full eagles.
I switched to champions or two handed swordsman I don’t remember which one the Ethiopians get.
I hid the switch behind my base and moved out when I had a good mass.
He had to run away from each fight and with 4-5 trebs I made a quick work of his castles and most of his base and he couldn’t dive with the eagles to snipe the trebs.
Well, if he had the time he could smash me with jaguar warriors or arbalest switch.
But this is what I mean by making it a surprise factor, it should be a finishing move or at least give a huge advantage right away.
One way, as I mentioned, is putting siege behind them to not give your opponent time to prepare a counter unit.
He can have options to counter them, but even if he gets to that counter unit eventually, you’ll have taken out most of his base and his eco by that time.
So champions are good vs trash.
But you dont want to sell resources, but use what little gold is left.
Or relic gold for the champions.
I can’t imagine making Viking champions late game when Elite Berserks are an option.
Malay, Malians, and Slavs are the only civs I ever intend to go militia line late game.
Champs are great sprinkled in with with your army.
They usually aren’t great to mass unless your civ has good benefits for them, but they are amazing in trash wars because they help fight off Halbs, Skirms, and at least distract Hussars.
I usually go Champs when I am going low in gold or my strategy involves denying gold and annoying my enemy.
Champs are super cheap if you get supplies and their gold cost is easy to get more of with market use.
I like to go into champs, when I managed to force the opponent into mass camels/pikes + monks in castle with mass knights.
They kill buildings very fast and are strong against most other units in small number fights, so I usually will attack at multiple spots at the same time.
You save on a castle or siege workshops/chemistry to kill castles/TCs, also on techs for other units and can easily follow up with some skirms/siege, if they manage to mass enough counter units.
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Still a very situational unit, but their strenght in killing buildings needs them to be weak against most units.
In post imp, when you make champions, it’s pop efficiency that wins fights, not cost efficiently.
Equal resources is not a good measure, although yeah, much better making pointy bois vs hussar
That’s one thing aoe4 has over aoe2: heavy infantry is actually viable in that game.
I think infantry has been long overdue for a buff.
Maybe they should be cheaper to create.
I only use the champ line in civs that have really strong bonuses, like Malian extra pierce armor.
I also like that they don’t have many cheap counters.
But overall, most civs have got better units to spend their gold on.
Champions have some insane bonuses for some civs and barely see any play even then.
Like the free +3 PA for Malians. 3 extra PA is sick, but the unit is still useless.
Champions need a biiiiiiiiiiiig buff.
Not sure if I saw a single champion in NAC
I agree a bit in the sense that Champions are a bit overrated as a general trash killer.
They’re not actually that great against Hussar, yes they trade decently on a pop basis, which certainly has some extra value in late game, but it’s still pretty wasteful on gold, which is at a premium at late game, and you’d probably get more value out of halb siege if that’s an option.
Champion is also pretty slow so even if it may soft counter Hussar in a direct engagement, it can’t force it.
They can’t catch halbs either, though they do dominate if they do.
Of course in a chaotic late game, the micro might not be there to guaranteed avoiding such fights, but it can be awkward to get the value out of Champions that you feel they should have on paper.
Probably the thing that makes a Champion switch feel like such a gamble, is the sheer quantity of time and resources it requires to make the switch.
With that said, I wouldn’t say there is no point to Champions, you do occasionally see a Champ switch in pro play, admittedly to mixed degrees of success.
It’s usually used to cover a specific comp weakness where a civ has a hole in a tech tree, but some civ bonuses can certainly make a Champion switch a bit more potent.
Though in most cases, those bonuses apply to the halbs too, so it’s often easier to let that try and swing the fight than invest in the switch.
They lose with infinite population at a bottomed out market, 0 relics and only considering direct combat.
This is way too many assumptions that will not be true in most games.
Trash wars often start way before all the gold on the map is gone (nobody is paying 1000 food for Plate Mail Armor) and in this situations, investing even some champions can have a big impact.
Champions tear through buildings much faster than any generic non-siege unit, while costing very little gold for that.
Your enemy might not be able to have 5x your number in Halbs like in that video if all their Barracks are getting destroyed.
While they may not hard counter all trash, they trade decently against them, and that has the benefit of only needing one unit line, potentially saving resources on upgrades you don’t need or even production buildings.
I don’t buy that champions not trading well vs Hussar / Magyar Huszar is a huge point against them.
If you’re making champions, odds are you are at least in a good position to make Halbs as well (unless you are Turks or Gurjaras I guess) so cavalry is less of a threat regarding cost efficiency.
SotL is testing a very specific scenario there and is very transparent about that.
Making straight Champions against straight Hussar is not a winning play, but nobody was arguing that.
I think a better showcase would have been to take two equivalent trash war armies and replace some fraction of one’s resources with champions.
I think you’re missing the point on multiple counts.
The very video you link immediately goes on to show how champions *do* counter halbs in any remotely realistic scenario.
The point of champions is that there is no unit that costs less gold that counters it.
You say that “you could make any other gold unit”, but that’s not true.
Hand cannoneers and arbalest are hard countered by skirms.
Cavalry is hard countered by halberdiers.
Champions are the only gold unit in the game that are not hard countered by a non-gold unit (ignoring special cases like Kamandaran crossbows or Forced Levy 2hs).
Yes, hussar is a more common lategame option, because they’re very good at raiding.
But a group of champions can just flatten your entire base.
You can also make them with just a few relics and some market use.
You cannot make meaningful arbalest or knights/camels with the same.
Here are some things champions are very good at :
They take down buildings really fast so you don’t need siege with them always.
They are a good counter to the dreaded halb+onager combo.
They have a very low gold cost ratio.
Heavy cavalry is close to 1:1 food:gold, archers are almost 1:2 and champs are better than 2:1(3:1 without supplies) .
This basically means that in a situation where you have gold but it’s limited and you still want a power unit, they are a good option.
For example if both players are playing full trash and have 1000 each.
You can make just over 20 archers that can be specifically sniped by skirms, you can make 14 heavy cavs that if you forget for a sec can die to halbs or you can make 50 champs that will dominate the engagement and are easier to control and don’t need micro.
I want to point out that they are usually used with civs that have a bonus for them and not generic ones so usually you will either have more, have them be tankier or deal more damage than generic ones used in calculations.
>Champions even lose to Halberdier and Hussar under equal resources
This is only true if you value gold to food/wood at a 6:1 ratio, which undervalues gold units.
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