Champion cavalry improvements

[real_tabasco_sauce]

1 hour ago, TheCJ said:

Is it fine as it is? Walls are currently so irrelevant, most people wouldn't even notice if we removed them.

Of course, nobody likes it if "Bunkering"/Turtling becomes "meta", but making walls atleast useable in some situations would not have that effect.

 

Otherwise you make good points!

Check out the community mod. Walls are cheaper/faster to build but weaker. Weaker as in you can destroy stone walls with infantry, but it just takes a while.

by making walls and palisades cheaper but weaker, they are more useful early on and less useful in the late game.

[real_tabasco_sauce]

44 minutes ago, Seleucids said:

A24 PTSD 

walls weren't even really necessary in a24. Just forts and archers.

[chrstgtr]

2 hours ago, real_tabasco_sauce said:

walls weren't even really necessary in a24. Just forts and archers.

I think he meant the turtling meta isn’t desirable. 

Also, walls aren’t useless. They do a good job of slowing an invading army and are regularly built for that purpose. Making them more easily destroyed helps eliminate that “build to only frustrate” meta that walls are in. 

Edited April 20 by chrstgtr

[TheCJ]

4 minutes ago, chrstgtr said:

are regularly built for that purpose

Hm, are they? Not in the games I play in, but I'll take your word for it. Then the wall situation maybe isnt as bad as it looked to me, sorry.

[chrstgtr]

36 minutes ago, TheCJ said:

Hm, are they? Not in the games I play in, but I'll take your word for it. Then the wall situation maybe isnt as bad as it looked to me, sorry.

Yeah, they’re used. But the way that with eyes used kind of elicits an eye roll, so the situation might actually be worse than you realize. 

99% of time they’re used to just frustrate the attacking player. Walls confuse pathing and give an extra object for siege to attack before moving onto a more useful building. So they have an entirely passive existence

Wall typically don’t serve any active purpose of making defenses stronger, which is what you probably want them to do. 

the proposal might make them less likely to be used in the annoying passive way since they’ll be easier to destroy (but they’ll also be easier to spam, so maybe not). To be determined if the proposal does anything to make them better for building active defenses 

Edited April 20 by chrstgtr

[Deicide4u]

37 minutes ago, chrstgtr said:

give an extra object for siege to attack before moving onto a more useful building. So they have an entirely passive existence

That's the purpose of walls. Also, you wall off the most vulnerable positions to force the attacker into a more favorable position for your army. 

I rarely build walls in any RTS, but I would be very frustrated if my opponent walled off his base. That means I have no viable entry until siege weapons become available.

Walls are not built frequently in 0 A. D., and that means they need some changes to make them more affordable. The recent changes to building armor by @real_tabasco_sauce in the Community mod will also make them more desirable. 

[Dakara]

Believe me, we shouldn't make walls easy. Palisades are quite cheap. Walls are generally built fairly quickly and provide quite good protection.There have already been some interesting changes. Like doubling the garrison capacity on walls.

Change bunker system it is not the solution 

 

Spoiler

This is a bit off topic, but I find siege weapons a bit too durable compared to their resource and population costs. They have a huge amount of health for very good resistance.

Bolt : 200 HP

Cata HP : 375 HP 25 Sec

Ram : 400 HP 30 sec

Tower siege : 500 hp 40 Sec

In 0AD, ranged units have less health. But not siege units. That's strange. Nerf them to :

Bolt HP : 200 HP  - No change

Cata HP : 200 HP 30 Sec

Tower siege : 300 HP 40 Sec Remove crush damage

Ram : 300 HP 25 Sec

In a fight between two equal armies, if you decide to attack the sieges with a few units, you have little chance of winning your fight. And even if you are lucky enough to destroy the siege unit, you will have spent more resources than your opponent on the lost units. And I'm even talking about units that are supposed to be good against sieges (slashing damage)..

By the way, the Macedonian bonus is completely broken. Most of the time it's useless, but when you spam sieges it's really OP. It's a source of imbalance. Stack training timle and ressource is abuse.

 

[BreakfastBurrito_007]

In my opinion the biggest hindrance for walls being effective for their intended use (apart from annoying wall spam that turtle players do) is ease of placement and sealing. Snapping to/from buildings and obstructions such as cliffs would be awesome but I recognize its a complicated thing to accomplish. There have been games where I was able to get a lot of value out of palisade walls, trapping cav in my base or stopping raids, but usually the amount of attention and planning required is as prohibitively expensive as their cost and build time. Real tabasco's comm mod changes for palisades and walls should be a good step in the right direction, and hopefully we get enough comm mod games to make sure of that.

[Seleucids]

 

If you don't think this is broken...

 

For most civs, there is 0 counter to this madness. At the very least, remove these extra bonuses for Seleucids etc to make other civs playable

Edited May 9 by Seleucids

[Deicide4u]

@Seleucids

You shared an image of a fully upgraded champion heavy cavalry. I see nothing wrong there, it's Seleucid ultimate unit for a reason. Just train more upgraded spearmen.

[BreakfastBurrito_007]

People would argue whether or not seleucids have the best champ cav. Not me, I think they are the best but only with the hero alive. Seleucids also do not have a cheap melee cav option, so in a way they need their champ cav to be good. I agree champ cav in general needs to be nerfed of course but I disagree that seleucids unique bonuses are problematic.

[chrstgtr]

2 hours ago, Seleucids said:

For most civs, there is 0 counter to this madness. At the very least, remove these extra bonuses for Seleucids etc to make other civs playable

I always thought this was a really dumb change from a24

In a23 (and before), only Persia and Sele had the cav health upgrade. This made sense as those were the cav civs. Cav was still playable by other civs but it wasn’t OP. Persia and Sele had a true cav advantage but because they’re slower civs and going cav (vs inf) is slow, Sele and Persia never felt OP. 

Then in a24, all civs got the cav health upgrade. Suddenly, cav became the meta because all civs had access to OP cav that was much better than inf. In a24, Sele and Persia got the spear champ cav health upgrade, which was somehow both not useful enough (it only applied to one type of cav that is hard to produce so these cav civs were mostly the same as every other civ’s cav) and too useful (made spear champ cav, which was already the strongest unit in the game even stronger). 
 

tldr: the cav health upgrade shouldn’t exist for all civs and should replace the champ cav health upgrade for Persia and Sele. It will help with infvs cav balance and make Sele and Persia more unique while not being OP

Edited May 9 by chrstgtr

[Arup]

you could slow down the cataphract cav in comparison to other cavs in account of them having so much more armor, and also change the "multiplier against cavalry' for spear to a more total health percentage wise so instead of spear in dealing 1.5 times its own attack, it will deal an 5% of the cavalry (the one it is attacking) 's total health. this is just what i picked up from ark:survival where the biggest dinosaur, the titan can be countered by a smaller unit because that unit deals percentage wise damage

[Emacz]

Aren't they already slower? or did htey not do that in vanilla? They are slower in historical

Interesting idea of % of total health of enemy, although Im not sure if that is easy to write into the template.

[Deicide4u]

"QUICK! Nerf the champion spear cavalry!"

Meanwhile, CS javelin cavalry: Exists

The main reason ALL cavalry is OP is speed. They're simply too fast when compared to spear infantry (which should be their counter).

Spoiler

I just saw ValhiRant destroy Stockfishe's Spartiates using only hit and run javelin cavalry.

Either increase hoplite armor, or decrease the cavalry speed.

Edited June 7 by Deicide4u

[BeTe]

24 minutes ago, Deicide4u said:

"QUICK! Nerf the champion spear cavalry!"

Meanwhile, CS javelin cavalry: Exists

Spoiler?! :p

Edited June 7 by BeTe

[Deicide4u]

@BeTe, I put it, please remove the quoted spoiler part.

[Seleucids]

1 hour ago, Deicide4u said:

Meanwhile, CS javelin cavalry: Exists

CS jav cav was op in A25. But now they are not as OP because of the acceleration mechanic and the buffed spear cav hard countering them. 

 

1 hour ago, Deicide4u said:

The main reason ALL cavalry is OP is speed.

And speed is exactly why we make cavalry in the first place

 

1 hour ago, Deicide4u said:

ither increase hoplite armor

This is a good idea in my opinion

[BeTe]

4 hours ago, Deicide4u said:

"QUICK! Nerf the champion spear cavalry!"

Meanwhile, CS javelin cavalry: Exists

The main reason ALL cavalry is OP is speed. They're simply too fast when compared to spear infantry (which should be their counter).

  Hide contents

I just saw ValhiRant destroy Stockfishe's Spartiates using only hit and run javelin cavalry.

Either increase hoplite armor, or decrease the cavalry speed.

Aren't you the guy who fights against CS? So Cavs aren't CS so we want to encourage people to use them instead CS, don't we??

[Deicide4u]

48 minutes ago, BeTe said:

Aren't you the guy who fights against CS?

The game was balanced for having CS from the start, so they should stay. However, we should still get rid of the Female citizens and replace them with the generic two-gendered citizen unit with slightly altered gather rates.

But, I won't get too much into off-topic. 

[Dakara]

I'm reading some strange comments. Of course, cavalry should be faster; that's the principle of the unit. It already has minor penalties, such as reduced capture attack and suffering damage multiplication. The solution isn't to have a common citizen unit with a lance destroy a very expensive champion unit! The champion cavalryman is one of the most expensive units, so it must be one of the strongest units.

Furthermore, I believe it's necessary to balance champion units between each civilization. If I'm not mistaken, the Persian and Selucid champion cavalrymen are better suited to long melee combat than other civilizations because they have better range and armor. Their range needs to be nerfed and made sure they can't stack too much in a small space. For example, champion chariots already have this feature. This will allow the infantry to do their job.

Additionally, it is absolutely necessary to remove the 20% extra life tech on champions.

[real_tabasco_sauce]

i'm going to go ahead and do 3x counter. Anything else to do in the near term?

[Arup]

@real_tabasco_sauce slow down all cavalry. it doesn't make sense to think armored cav is so much faster than human fighter. I am pretty sure the speed difference is not realistic. Look at historical patch for suggestions and specifica

[chrstgtr]

1 hour ago, real_tabasco_sauce said:

i'm going to go ahead and do 3x counter. Anything else to do in the near term?

Speed. I think all cav could use a nerf. Setting their speed an about equal to fanatics seems about right with melee cav being slightly faster and range cav being the same as fana (also, would make fana a better counter, which I think it needs to be)

also, what exactly is the 3x counter? (Just want to make sure everyone is on same page)

kind of related, but melee inf should get a speed boost too. But that’s more of a range vs melee balancing issue. 

Edited June 15 by chrstgtr

[Seleucids]

1 hour ago, real_tabasco_sauce said:

i'm going to go ahead and do 3x counter. Anything else to do in the near term?

3x for whom against whom?

Ideally inf spear and inf pike get giant counter against champion cav, like 3x 4x 5x

But spear cav shouldn't counter other cavs at this rate, otherwise you are basically banning all cav strategies as soon as someone makes a few spear cav.