Heavy soldiers are (sadly) useless

[Baelish]

Me and my friends played lots of games, and all noticed that heavy soldiers, both infantry and cavalry) are useless.

 

The main strategy of almoast all players is to reach faster max population with basic soldiers and then replace a part of them with rams or other siege weapons. When the basic soldiers die they are replaced by other basic, fast producing and cheap ones.

 

Who, instead, decide to create an army of strong heavy ones can produce a maximum of 40 in the whole game duration (a 4vs4 tg is between 25 and 35 minutes). And when they die, it's impossible to replace them due to the lack of metal. You can produce metal thorough market, but you need a minimum of 40 traders and it is really slow. In addition traders need metal to be created.

 

This problem not exist for Gauls because their heavy army not need metal. So, we could make other heavy army cheaper in metal or make them stronger.

 

I know that this could ruin balance, but IMO it's necessary to diversify strategies because almost all players use the same.

 

 

[Player of 0AD]

This is wrong. Become a skilled player  with a decent understanding of the game and play on Mainland, then you'll learn that champions aren't useless at all.

However, traders are very bad, that's true.

[Baelish]

If it was a "skill issue", I didn't report it.

The title is on purpose clickbait, but in every recent game I played, all the players, strong and weak ones, play with the same war strategy.

I'm talking about an entire army of heavy soldiers and nobody can create it, so "not useless at all" isn't enough.

[TheCJ]

Heavy Spear Cav regularly decides games.

An army with 10-20 champs and 100 citizen soldiers wins against an army of 150 citizen soldiers.

I have played quite a few games where someone trained a lot more than 40 champions (often 100, but up to 300).

But you are correct that you can almost never make an army consisting *only* of champions... Which is good, imho. No army ever had only veteran soldiers

[Atrik]

17 hours ago, TheCJ said:

Heavy Spear Cav regularly decides games.

They need to be nerfed to at least not make it worth it to use allies as buffers and then win vs 2 or 3 players because they are totally broken. They should at least be bad when slamming into spears. Right now if your civ don't have spear cavalry, if you go into late game then your just sitting duck (even if you make 80% spears army composition or anything).

[BreakfastBurrito_007]

Diversifying and improving the gameplay experience is important, and people are working hard on that. Most players at the moment would consider cav champions in particular spear cav champions to be too strong. Especially troubling is the scenario where allies are sacrificed in order to make them. 

it is a bit confusing to me what you mean by “heavy”. The Gaul fanatics are champions, but they are anything but heavy. Its also worth mentioning that different maps have different resource availability. 

Having a purely champion army which you seem to idealize is not impossible, nor is it a weak army. It’s just not always a very efficient way to use resources.

Edited Saturday at 06:54 by BreakfastBurrito_007