Champion cavalry improvements

[AInur]

You create diversity by adding more to each faction, not by removing their essentials!

[PyrrhicVictoryGuy]

34 minutes ago, AInur said:

Not really. Any group of class b or class a infantry will get massacred by a significant number of champion cavalry

Not what i meant. In a CS fight, with meat shield + skirms against cav, the meat shield units( spears or pikes) won't actually kill cav faster than the skirms

[PyrrhicVictoryGuy]

23 minutes ago, AInur said:

As I said, most 0ad problems are caused by handicapping civilisations. If every civ has champion melee cavalry then the problem is solved.

There are people who want to play Mauryas Athens and Sparta. These civs shouldn't be removed from the game. Your quest for diversity reduced diversity. Sometimes making the base structure tree the same helps a lot

In the past you had complaints about slingers, archers, pikeman, skirmisher cavalry, almost every unit. If you had given every civilisation an archer, a skirmisher/ slinger, the problems wouldn't have existed! Everyone can make that op unit and it wouldn't have been a thing!

You know i remember when everyday i saw maurya and persians in multiplayer, back in the days of A24, didn't enjoy fighting them one bit. 

[TheCJ]

2 hours ago, AInur said:

If you had given every civilisation an archer, a skirmisher/ slinger, the problems wouldn't have existed! Everyone can make that op unit and it wouldn't have been a thing!

I'm sorry, but what are you even talking about. This does not solve most of the issues, especially not the relevant ones.

If everyone had the "op unit", it would still be a race to mass this unit as fast as possible. Pockets would still let their flanks die, so they can get more champs quicker. The gameplay would still be stale and unsatisfying.

The only part of the problem this would solve, is that as long as there is an op unit, civs that can't recruit that unit are too weak/throw picks.

But the issue in the first place is, that there is an op unit at all.

 

Also, your proposal would basically kill all civ individuality, except for the heroes. Which I'm guessing you want to equalize next? Bcs its unfair that some civs dont have a +25% hero? 

Yea no, I actually like different civilisations. But I must give you one true core in your proposal; every civ should have *some* answer to every unit (But as far as I see it, thats already the case)

[Meister]

I recently saw a fight without community mod, where 80 bhactrian champ cavalry (persia, all upgrades, wtf, cav hero) lost to 120 CS, about 50% spears 50% archers(carth, all upgrades, wtf, hannnibal).
BUT: the ponies were slammed into the spears, while archers were untouched. This wouldnt happen in pro games...
In the end  80 cav were dead while 50 CS survived.
why did this work? Because they dont deal that much dmg. Archers do constant dmg, no walking, no getting stuck.
In new community mod, melee deals too much damage. melee cav is really fast and can kill archers first often. The com mod dmg balance made melee cav much too strong in my opinion.

Another thing that about melee chamion cav: since their speed difference to ranged is greater now, iberic champs have 0 chance against spear champ cav. that is different in non-comm-mod, where with decent micro they do have a chance.
My recommendation: make them slower, take a little damage from them, make them tankier again. (in general, make adjustments to melee dmg buff in comm mod)

Edited November 26 by Meister

[Friedrich123]

I personally think that the problem we are talking about is rooted deeper than just champion cavalry:
cavalry units in general. More specifically their mobility paired with their higher popefficiency

Lets ignore their mobility for a second and just look at the raw stats compared to infantry. Take citizen javelineers as an example:

50 food cost more for a unit that has:
110hp vs 50
3, 1, 15 vs 1, 1, 10 resistance
18 vs 16 dmg

Now granted you need a separate building (which costs funnily 50 stone (or wood depending on civ) less than a barrack) to train them and you need to click 2 upgrades. But still, in TGs going lategame youd be actually throwing the game if you wouldnt build cavalry from minute 16 on onwards. The 12.5% damage alone justifies its cost in scenarios where food and wood isnt a limiting factor

Now lets state the obvious: Cavalry is faster than infantry

17.82 vs 11.4 speed, if we use the above example

And this is not a problem per se. It is the lack of obstructions that limit that mobility. It already got mentioned briefly in this thread by breakfastbourrito_007. I do agree with most of his ideas. What i would like to add though: pallisades should be build quicker and easier placable, I am not entirely sure about the cost too.
Why is that even relevant?
If only one side cavalry in a game, the side with cavalry is far more likely to win. Not only due to the discussed popefficiency above, but due to mapcontrol. Let me elaborate:

When players attack they usually dont attack with all their units. They anticipate having to rebuild lost troops and as you need at least some eco for that, they have their 40-50 women on food and another 15-20 citizen soldiers on wood.
Well these are prime raiding targets for an oponent with 10-15 citizen cavalry to attack. Or he will just take your barracks while you are away with the main force of your troops. Or hell catch some stragglers or the units you reproduced on their way. but most likely he will raid your eco with it. His is untouched. As long as he doesnt decisively loses the fight or in a teamgame has another player to aliviate for his disadvantage (which is unlikely, since he has more popefficient units and defenders advantage), he will just be able to outproduce his opponent. Now this raiding gets especially rough when he sends in like 5 champs or even better 5 champs+cav hero.
Well @#$%. if you leave your base you will most likely be outproduced and lose the game. Walling is in 95% of the cases not an options or doesnt work, due to walls/palisades are. Building towers or defensive structures? They cant kill anything.
Ok so what is your realistic option? If you cant beat them, join them: Build cavalry yourself. Now that also puts you at a disadvantage: You need to build buildings, click technologies, switch up your eco, losing the initiative and completely lose map control. And when your enemy decides to take the initiative and attack with 30 champion cavalry while the tech to unlock them for you just went through, youll lose the fight.

Now of course this scenario is a bit stylized. But I played and witnessed many games where that happened: You have no cav? you are doomed to sit in your base.
One thing I would like to add is that building cavalry usually takes a bit of more time than just booming. So there is a small sweetspot around minute 13-14 where an all out infantry attack with is possible and has good chances. But especially in TGs where people tend to play more defensively that rarely happens and after minute 15 that opportunity has passed. Having 50-60 FU champs by minute 16 is possible and well then the game is over if no enemy did that.

 

Now not to dwell about my hatred for cavalry entirely, i do like cavalry in one scenario: early/mid game rushes
Cavalry being an above average unit is necessary if you try to rush someone. You not focussing on eco and having to disrupt your enemies eco at least to the same amount with your units is a risk. But it can pay off, if you execute it correctly. And if you build the right units. Dont get me wrong, I think you can absolutely rush someone with normal units like archers. But it is far riskier, because they either dont have the mobility or/and arent strong enough to win against an enemy with equal numbers. Such as cavalry or naked fanatics.
But the factors that make these rushes possible are exactly the same ones that make cavalry just so opressive in the late game. So I myself I am not so sure how to fix that issue. cavalry costing more pop would be one solution, but I dont think its an be all-end all fix.

In conclusion: In my opinion most of the issues people and myself have with champion cavalry are just extremes of other (in my eyes) unbalanced and problematic issues. Raiding should be a valid strat, you should be able to express your skill with the micro of fast units, etc. But you should to be able to defend just as good against it, which is sadly at the moment not the case

 

[real_tabasco_sauce]

1 hour ago, Meister said:

My recommendation: make them slower, take a little damage from them, make them tankier again. (in general, make adjustments to melee dmg buff in comm mod)

welcome to the forum!

I agree with the speed point. Cavalry are supposed to be faster than infantry but they don't need to be that much faster. What I would like is actually just to delete the cav speed tech (and for that matter the general cav HP tech). These technologies are so cheap that they basically serve as a direct buff to the late game stats of cavalry. Early on, they conflict with the actual training of cavalry. However, I know this point is controversial.

1 hour ago, Meister said:

In new community mod, melee deals too much damage.

Now about the com mod in general, the melee/ranged rebalance does give champ melee cavalry more damage, but it handles all melee units equally in that regard. The issue with champ cav in vanilla is that they are shockingly tanky and pretty much the only way to lose a lot of persian, seleucid, or roman champs is to either take a losing fight like you mentioned or to be forced to take the fight.

Seleucid champs in vanilla: 400 hp, 15 hack, 14 pierce armor w/ hero while doing less damage than an infantry skirmisher. They have almost as much hack armor as a stable or barracks: about 9% more hack damage than a stable (88% vs 79% resistance).

Also, a possible reason the champs lost is the player failed to make lots of skirm cav in order to deal damage (CS skirm cav deal much more damage than champ melee cav, 29% more damage). in vanilla, champs are extremely tanky, acting like a damage sponge so these skirm cav are very protected and are free to do tons of damage.

While changes in damage are very easy to apply across unit types, armor is not. Because it is discrete, there were probably cases where the ideal armor values were not reached. So, if something should be changed, i'd suggest to decrease champ cav armor values.

Decreasing hack armor in particular serves to lessen sword units' near irrelevance to melee champ cav, and will compound nicely with the existing cav multiplier for spearmen possible meaning no change to the counter value is needed.

Edited November 26 by real_tabasco_sauce

[chrstgtr]

2 hours ago, real_tabasco_sauce said:

agree with the speed point. Cavalry are supposed to be faster than infantry but they don't need to be that much faster. What I would like is actually just to delete the cav speed tech (and for that matter the general cav HP tech). These technologies are so cheap that they basically serve as a direct buff to the late game stats of cavalry. Early on, they conflict with the actual training of cavalry. However, I know this point is controversial.

Decreasing speed will look weird in my opinion. 

An alternative way to get at this is to make cav harder to mass. Make their train time longer and/or increase cost.
 

The fact that players will just stop booming around 160 pop so that they can fill it with cav says that inf doesn’t attack fast enough to punish the player that purposely stops making pop. 
 

2 hours ago, real_tabasco_sauce said:

The issue with champ cav in vanilla is that they are shockingly tanky

I’ve been saying this for awhile. I still think the tank problem exists in com mod. Cav of any type should not be able to run into spears without fear. I’m fine with champ cav being able to tank against sword or range as champ cav is supposed to easily kill those units. But spear is supposed to be the counter now, which just isn’t the case

Edited November 27 by chrstgtr

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

4 hours ago, real_tabasco_sauce said:

What I would like is actually just to delete the cav speed tech (and for that matter the general cav HP tech). These technologies are so cheap that they basically serve as a direct buff to the late game stats of cavalry. Early on, they conflict with the actual training of cavalry. However, I know this point is controversial.

I'd reduce base cavalry speed by the amount of the speed tech, then increase the cost of the speed tech. Same idea for the health tech.

[TheCJ]

It seems to me that we agree no unit should be fast *and* tanky at the same time, which seems like a reasonable proposition, as highly armoured cavalry wont be able to reach the speed of their lightly armoured counterparts. 

 

Thus, either reduce the speed of units like the cataphract, and emphasize their role as "tanks", being able to deal lots of damage and take lots before dying;

or reduce their armour values, and emphasize their role as a flanking/raiding support unit, that can quickly deal with archers and farmers, but die when caught by enemy spearmen.

 

One could even imagine diversifying champ spear cav by making the champ spear cav of one civilization into more of a tank and the champ spear cav of another civilization into more of a raiding unit.

Or letting the player choose by introducing a tech-pair, where one tech decreases speed but increases armour and the other tech increases speed but decreases armour.

[chrstgtr]

9 hours ago, real_tabasco_sauce said:

What I would like is actually just to delete the cav speed tech (and for that matter the general cav HP tech)

Another thing to consider is that the health tech didn't use to be universal (speed tech too? either way, I don't think any extra 1.6 in speed is really making a big difference). It used to only go to the cav civs (persia and sele) got the special health tech. Those civs were slow enough that the late game cav advantages weren't OP because players would be forced in constant fight before they could mass cav. 

I never liked this change from a23-->a24. It took away civ differentiation. And it was done to make all civs cav viable, which was already the case anyways. 

[real_tabasco_sauce]

well, yeah i recognize its a bit divisive.

instead, i think hack armor tweaks are the best way forward at least for the time being.

[Seleucids]

This champion spear cavs have been misused to the extent of ruining TGs. I noticed that the biggest abusers are Gauls and Macedonians, not Persians or Seleucids as you would expect. We can't fix it quickly as clearly nobody can reach agreement on how to change them, so here are some advice to countering champ cav spammers:

1. Ban spear cav champs from your TG. Don't be soft, we had to do this every Alpha.  We've banned Celts in A23, archer civs in A24, Merc in A25 . Time for spear champs in A26. 

2. Pick Spartan civ and make huge amounts of Hoplite + Leonidas. Replace dead Hoplites with Spartiates. Champ cav die on contact with Spartan infantry units. Spartans can also make their own spear cav to counter archer cav spam - good. Your 20 spear cav can also kill lone champs on their supply line. At the first sign of the champ spam, ignore your teammates, go straight for his base. Otherwise your team is dead if someone gets 30 champs. 

Ideally you play on fixed on fixed position map and place the Spartan player on the border, so that they don't have to walk far to defend against raids. 

3. Don't pick these civs: Athen, Britons, Mauryas, Iberians, Han, because you will be sitting duck with 0 defence against them. Athenians have good Hoplites in theory, but they are too slow and these champ cavs will hit and run on your base. 

4. If you get a civ with champ spear cav, your only way to survive is to spam champion cav faster than your enemy. 

 

Sword cav champs are more op than spear cav champs if you look at stats, but they are not as hated. Why? Because the spear cav champs counters other cavalry - basically bans the usage of any cavalry unit for the whole enemy team. You achieve cavalry monopoly. The advantage is then you can hit and run enemy bases without penalty. On top of that, spear cavs can beat spear inf so they are omnipotent on Mainland. Not all civs have spear inf champs so it's GG unless the other team is made of 4 good Spartan players. Sword cav champs will die to large number of citizen spear cav so it is counterable. 

With certain bonuses and heroes, these cavs have undying health and unparalleled speed - totally unbeatable. No skill is required to control them once you reach 40, 50 such units. 

Edited December 3 by Seleucids

[BreakfastBurrito_007]

On 3/12/2024 at 3:41 PM, Seleucids said:

amps from your TG. Don't be soft, we had to do this every Alpha.  We've banned Celts in A23, archer civs in A24, Merc in A25 . Time for spear champs in A26. 

It’s definitely worth keeping in mind that not all of these are similarly OP. A24 and A25 were far and above more OP than the others. 

[Fabius]

On 04/12/2024 at 1:41 AM, Seleucids said:

Sword cav champs are more op than spear cav champs if you look at stats, but they are not as hated. Why? Because the spear cav champs counters other cavalry

To be fair only Rome gets champion sword cavalry, almost everybody else gets spear cavalry champions, thus more options to use and abuse the spear cavalry champions, whereas you will never see the other unless someone plays Rome. That being said it does feel often like countering heavy cavalry is annoyingly difficult unless you are Sparta