What Would Happen if a Ranged Unit Ignored Pierce Armor and How Could it be Balanced?
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In short, if we had an archer unit that could ignore pierce armor, they would be short-ranged, have low-ish base attack, and would not be able to damage siege units, ships, or buildings.
They would still be countered by Rams and Mangonels, and would be cost-inefficient against Skirmishers.
So.
A Mameluke, throwing axeman, chakram thrower, and Gbeto that has a hard time killing siege?
Interesting concept.
Generally the balance for those units is low range (Mameluke 3, TA 5, Chakram 6, Gbeto 6) and fairly low fire rate.
But if it doesn’t kill siege well, then you could probably buff the range or fire rate slightly (to maybe match xbow).
Personally I think it would be cool if slingers had this ability.
Since a sling doesn’t really pierce armor anyways like arrows or guns.
And their damage output is pretty low against any non-infantry units.
1 damage for base, 2 damage for elite.
Extremely expensive or extremely fragile so that a well placed onager shot melts them.
Probably also with 4 range instead of 5.
Having a unit with that potential against skirms, siege and other high value high pierce armor targets is extremely powerful, and should be adjusted accordingly.
At the same time you also want to have a use for Arbalests; in this case they would perform better against units with less PA (such as +2 upgraded units).
2 or 3 base damage for both regular and elite version.
Throwing Axmen
I mean, ranged units that deal melee damage are exactly the thing made for this.
Honestly just making it a more real-world accurate version of a crossbow – moderate range, slow movement speed and slow reload time but devastating one time damage that ignores armor.
Kinda like the sniper unit from Empire Earth 1.
Because of the micro intensive nature of the unit you’d have to keep them supported, and they’d be prone to overkill in large groups.
Actually I think going the opposite way makes more sense.
High attack with high reload time.
This way the armor ignoring occurs less frequently, you would balance it to give a similar DPS as other ranged units in it’s price range
>Additionally, they’d still be cost-inefficient against Skirmishers, even if they ignore the pierce armor (and FU Elite Skirms would outrange them by 1, at least).
This is pretty tough to achieve unless they’re really quite expensive or have terrible fire rate (like skirmishers do).
If you give this unit even just 1 base attack (and 2 elite) it’s doing 3 damage to skirms in castle age and 6 in imp.
Xbow/arb do 1 and 2 damage respectively.
So this unit does triple the damage to skirms as xbow/arb even with only 1 (2) base attack.
I can’t see a way of mitigating this that doesn’t make the unit suck against everything else.
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