PyrrhicVictoryGuy

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.

Very nice , good job and keep developing delenda est

thanks for clarifying man , the first one on the left looks sick

Quick update , phillip indeed has the armor , i tested this just now but i swear i did a game where he had that brown armor that is on his portrait , maybe he also has cuirass permutations?

In game his model has a cheap looking cuirass, seriously it looks like something a larper would use. I would give his model the cuirass that was found in his tomb.

Like seriously Phillip makes xbow and companions godly. For cavalry i find that you have to kinda trick your opponent to bait them into coming a bit ou of position since that is what melee cav punishes more . I am yet to try spear cav plus cav skirms or regular skirms though . The only gripe i have with phillip is that in game he doesn't have the vergina cuirass. Demetrios is a very safe and solid choice obviously but I'll always remember him as the poor sod who couldn't take Rhodes.

In one word... Phillipos

Every soldier spawns in aggressive stance hence why they stop collecting , i sugest putting them in defensive or even passive .

Ah ok CS was citizen soldiers desculpa

what do you mean?

Well here is a proposal , don´t know if anyone has already said but i just came up with it . What ifcitizen soldier could be restricted to building like 2/3 of the buildings available and women could only build farms , corrals , farmsteads , houses , etc ... ( carthage soldiers could build the apartements in phase 1) , i mean people don´t even use soldiers for farming , so "mirroring " real life , these soldiers would be builders , architects , philosophers , carpenters, etc... first and conscripts later so would make sense that they would know how to build barracks / fortresses , armories and what not . Then women would be primarly resource gathereers and soldiers could no longer collect these , so unless the player wanted to go on a massive building spree wich would be unlikely due the smaller amount of resources collected due to women being bad at getting anything but food, this would in turn open the way for another class of gathereers wich i have already seen in some topics , the slave would be better at getting stone and metal . All this would make rushes more viable since the victim of the rush, lets a say a booming player would have a lot less troops since booming would not equal turtling in this proposed scenario.

Well that is a shame , at the moment when you make a syntagma , the phalangites just spread out like normal and i was expecting a bit more going forward but oh well.

For all that it's worth , the 2 column formation really helps with pathfinding and micro of melee cav

As i was playing I started to wonder what the formations do at the moment, especially the more specific ones like the syntagma , phalanx and wedge ? They aren´t fully impelemented as the starting screen in the menu states ( looking at you phalanx) and so i would like to ask what is planned for these 3 formations i mentioned in the next iteration of the game , not only from a unit stat change but their behavior in combat as well . Of course i would also ask what would you guys think about the ups and downs of their implementation in regards to the current meta.

The camp swords really make the diference although you can g with a 5/1 or maybe 5/2 , pikemen swordsman ratio , get no more than 5 elephants ( 10 or more if go with seleukus) , then sink your resources in the champ cav paired with stable upgrades and antiochus , this army comp will make godly at micro when you eventually start winning ehehheh.

i mean nerfing ranged cav is good but these changes also hurt spear and sword cav, especially since spear cav already struggles agains't ranged units due to their low pierce armor