[Anonymous Player]

Some people on this subreddit have claimed that Samurai were originally supposed to switch between a bow and a sword, like Ratha.

However, Sandy Peterson, a lead designer who worked on unique units, has stated that the original idea for Samurai was actually a charge attack to represent iaijutsu.

Peterson then wanted them to be archers to align with historical accuracy.

The Cataphract was initially supposed to be the unit switching between ranged and melee modes, but technical issues caused all these ideas to be scrapped.

It’s possible that Peterson misremembers, and the Samurai were originally intended to switch between ranged and melee modes instead.

[BubblyMango]

>All these were scrapped due to technical issues.

So i remember seeing from an old q&a of the original developers that the idea was scrapped not due to technical issues, but because this mechanic has the potential to be very annoying.

Their example was sending your units to attack a treb, coming back a minute later realizing they were on ranged mode so the treb is still alive.

[warassasin]

Interesting!

I still think that giving them an archer mode would be a good gameplay design for their niche.

Currently they are supposed to be an “anti unique unit” unit but act only as an ‘anti melee unique unit’ unit.

If they could switch to a very low damage archer unit that retains high bonus damage against unique units, it would help them with archer unique units and things like war wagons and magundai that currently beat samurai convincingly, because of their weakness in these situations you go champions line instead of samurai in a ton of matchups which is a bit disappointing.

Giving them very low base ranged attack would also mean that they stay better as melee units in most larger engagements, not significantly changing their identity in larger engagements.

[SFWBattler]

I forgot which but IGN or Gamespot had a series of articles back in 1999 detailing AoK civ by civ and I believe Greg Street mentioned the Samurai Sword-Bow concept.

I’m having a hard time finding the articles now, though.

[Holy-Roman-Emperor]

You don’t remember wrong.

In another video, he says that the switch mode wouldn’t work against units like Rams giving the example of the Samurai.

That being said, there was also a multi purpose cavalry for the Persians with the same mechanic, which probably got morphed into the Byzantine Cataphract (which as you say was also multipurpose).

If Cataphracts were regional units, Byzantines and Persians would surely get them.

Probably Chinese as well.

So I get how the Persian UU became the Byzantine UU.

Edit: it is also possible that this mechanic was originally planned for both units, considering the Cataphract is a mounted unit and the Samurai is a foot soldier.

[Deep-Advantage8054]

You may as well make them Cavalry Archers if you want maximum Historical Accuracy.

You may also want to make them Obuch since that is historically accurate.

Give them a spear bonus damage while you are at it, they are also armed with spear as main arm.

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