PyrrhicVictoryGuy

I fully support this and even noted some of my ideas down but as someone already told me , Delenda Est already does some of these Melee infantry: Firstly, melee soldiers should only do hack damage just to make it simple. · Pikemen/spearmen: I want to differentiate between pike civs (Macedon and Successor Kingdoms) and spear civs (Greeks, Carthage). #Both should keep their anti cav bonus but note that being more tightly packed to attacking behind one another and their lower pierce armour make their counter pretty obvious. #Their rate of attack should stay the same. #Another thing, pike civs shouldn't have access to spearmen except for mercenaries and/or champions, the same applies for spear civs. #To further differentiate between civs, the Macedonian pike must have slightly better states than those of the successors to simulate the experience Macedonians had in phalanx warfare vs the native levies that the successors trained. Champions These for the most part are fine but like their citizen counterparts I propose that we change up champions. Take these 3 civs whose cavalry champions are spearmen: Macedon, Seleucids and Ptolemies and their hetairoi, kataphracktoi , agema cav respectively. We could make gameplay more interesting and appease the historical accuracy crowd at same time. The hetairoi could be the less armoured of the three but more powerfull attack wise, the kataphraktoi could be exactly the opposite (as their name implies) and the Ptolemaic agema cav could be a middle ground. Of course, this was just an example, all champs could be tweaked in a similar manner.

But pikemen being good against cav but bad against archers is the holy triangle of RTS counters!! Historically I bet they were more vunarable to archers than hoplites due their shield ( not sure if i should call it pelta) being smaller than the traditional aspis.

"... pikemen needed to have huge armor stats" Yeah its weird , when I first played and didn't knew how to check unit's stats I was adamant that spearmen had better armor than pikemen.

Didn't you mean sword cav? Anyway i'll cav balance for another post.

If Seleucids have sword cav i don't think we will see spear cav after phase 2 anymore . People will just go for sword cav everytime since these outperform spear cav by alot , except aginst other cavalry but thse encounters are few and far between as you are way more likely to face archer spam or spear/sword spam with some siege for support.

Should we homogenize the damage type done by both spear and sword cavalry? Like giving spear cav only hack damage?

Well well , get wowgetofyourcellphone to make patches asap .

Amém brother

Wait really? I new the mod was a sort of overhall for the game but as it isn't ported to A24 i didn't even bother getting the A23 compatible version.

I remember those nasty wolves in aom , that and fibulwinter....

Yes you are right but how many people you see using stand ground on pikemen? In theory thats what they should do but as you saw in the video they tend just be side by side and when they get behind one another it is barely noticeable to the point It doesnt really matter if they do or not.

Yup that's a nice compromise and negates the need to add another gatherer class.

Well soldiers do gather wood slightly better than women and gather metal and stone way faster, they only resource were they faill is food. So in my modest opinion, yes you can build an army and build your economy at the same time because more soldiers means more of those three resources.

Hence the nerfing of their stats i mentioned. Furthermore even if their stats weren't nerfed a bit , you can bet that large numbers of pikemen would be countered by the godly ranged inf. (which in this case i fully support theirs use) and anti-infantry siege units. So more varied gameplay i think, like aoe2 has the kamayuks and they don't break the game. But i don´t know maybe you are right.

loose idea here. Make it so women can only build houses, farms, farmsteads and storehouses, secondly remove the ability to collect resource from citizen soldier but still allow them to build all buildings. Lastly i have seen talk of introducing another gatherer type on the forums , specifically about slaves, that with my proposal could be introduced as specialized stone and metal gatherers since the citizens wouldn't be able to collect them. Naturally these slaves wouldn't be able anything and they would probably have stats compared to women. I think all three of these aspects would bring new dynamic gameplay as more soldiers would no longer equal more eco power.

Great , i had this idead because it would kinda replicate the phalanx without the use of those useless formations and would allow them to retain worst attack stats then spearmen because more of them could attack at the same time balancing it out.

I think pikemen should behave like the AOE II kamayuk, "Kamayuks are most effective in large groups, as they have a range of one, enabling them to attack from behind one another". https://ageofempires.fandom.com/wiki/Kamayuk

Negating the loot and making them ungarrisonable and not be healed by buildings is a great way to balance them if they end up coming up with stats between champ and CS. The one thing i would add is that maybe we have to revision what mercenaries are available to each civ.

Everyone uses control groups , i personally like to put both melee inf and a dozen or so ranged troops in group 1 in battle line since the game puts melee troops , specially champions in the front ranks and ranged inf in the back , i also put cav with group 2 in collumn formation since from my experience their pathfinding seems better and their collision is marginally lessed.

It depends i think , there is skill in optimizing your eco and that is almost completely different from combat skill. The first tends to become a glass ceiling while the latter is far trickier to gauge precisely because it has so many variables. Being good at troop micro and game sense / map knowledge are good ways to measure a player's skill but aren't always rewarded. For example, micro management's impact decreasses as the game goes on( and most games only end after phase 3) as it either dies when the game starts to chug and/or isn't really effective when going for a players home base( from my experience, an overwhelming majority of fights happen at someone's doorstep , there isn't almost any open field battles) and lastly some, not all, micro intensive units suffer from extremely awful path finding and collision issues. Might as well just set the spawn point of barracks to where the fight is and shift + mouse 1 away.

Hell i am even working on a compilation of my suggestions for the game and this is one the games i explicit show concern about.

Completely agree , the game's balance should mainly revolve around the handfull of melee units we have. The same units should counter or at the very least soft counter eachother in a triangle or a square like faction. Remember this isn't Age of Empires 3 where all you get are musketeers , dragoons and skirmishers doing hit and run footsies. One of our best models for balance should be earlier aoe games or the aom games if one can such comparisson .

I think we also have to be very carefull regarding what mercs are available to specific civs , not only to reduce redundancy but mainly because we are proposing to make stronger , namely i would sugest having them be rank 2 from the get go and giving them the first attack upgrade from the armory( + 1 attack be it melee or ranged) and making the tech " expertise in war " being the rank 3 upgrade. Furthermore i would also disable their building mechanic to balance my earlier buffs and as professional soldiers they would only fight.

Yeah currently people go for mauritanian archers and libyan spearmen spam and maybe maybe have like 10 - 20 merc swordsmen to counter rams.

Engineering degree and masters makes me a very busy and even more stressed student so i can´t really help beyond testing , hell i haven´t even tested Yekaterina's mace catraphracts mod yet.