Fanatics Are Broken Beyond Repair — The Real Spam Nightmare After Champ Cavs

[king reza the great]

Besides the champion cavaliers, Fanatics are by far the most broken units in the game. Seriously, these units are insanely overpowered and hard to counter. Can anyone name a unit that can reliably stop Fanatics? I bet you can’t.

They run fast, deal massive damage, and don’t even require metal to produce, which makes spamming them nonstop super easy. The only thing the developers could have done to stop the spamming of this unit was to add metal as a required resource. Unfortunately, they didn’t do that

There are players abusing this by spamming Fanatics in P2, and it’s ruining the game for everyone. I wouldn’t be surprised if some ecobot or clever Celt player designed this unit to exploit the game by spamming them relentlessly for an unfair advantage.

What do you guys think? Any ideas on how to properly nerf or counter these broken units? I believe adding metal as a required resource to build them would be an effective way to balance this unit. Moreover all cav champs should be nerfed for sure.
We’ve already banned Champion Cavaliers from our games, and Fanatics definitely need to be banned as well. If the developers don’t nerf these units in the next alpha update and keep introducing unfair, broken units, we’ll have no choice but to keep banning them from our matches to maintain fair gameplay.

Edited August 4 by king reza the great

[Deicide4u]

I have a different suggestion.

How about the 20-30 top-rated "competitive" players agree on a "multiplayer balance" mod, and y'all start using this mod in your games?

Leave the "broken" units alone. Every single RTS has them.

[ffm2]

I think in games where champ cav are banned, the civs with the cav mercinaries in mass have the same dynamic as the champ cav previously had. Only available to some civs which are the ones that usually didn't had champ cav.

Last time camels worked great against the fanatics. Just back them up in time. Use 2 groups supporting each other. Occasionally use citizen soldiers when they are nearby - but don't chase.

As the game progresses one should move away from only citizen soldiers. Elephant archers or siege towers in mass are good too. Just because a tactic can be applied successfully doesn't mean it's OP.

One could make some game specific balance like here, but I don't think it's that bad. I would even include champ cav in games.

[Deicide4u]

11 minutes ago, ffm2 said:

Only available to some civs which are the ones that usually didn't had champ cav.

Except Carthage, which has both

But yeah, 100% of the above. There will always be some strong unit that will carry the game, no matter how many OP units you ban.

[guerringuerrin]

27 minutes ago, ffm2 said:

As the game progresses one should move away from only citizen soldiers.

Totally agree on this. But I'd say that every unit should have a counter unit to make the game more dinamically. If a unit doesnt have a counter at least from a good number of civs, then the game just turns into a champcav race. And thats make some kind of boring gameplays

[Dakara]

5 minutes ago, guerringuerrin said:

Totally agree on this. But I'd say that every unit should have a counter unit to make the game more dinamically. If a unit doesnt have a counter at least from a good number of civs, then the game just turns into a champcav race. And thats make some kind of boring gameplays

Hi, i don't like age of empire for this reason, too much counter of counter. 0ad fight are cool,you don't need too much knowledge. 

 

Yes, fanatics are strong. You have to know how to reduce their strength (remove their armor and shield?) or reduce their spam (increase the resource cost). We can even imagine the downgrade to a "mercenary" unit, I mean not champion but not citizen. So it would be a rank 2 unit that costs wood and food. They keep their strength against the cav and can harass a little but less. But above all, their control capacity with the high capture attack is removed.

Banning units is not the solution so we have to find a solution, what do the people on the balance team think?

 

Spoiler

If you ban a unit, there's always another META that comes along with a unit or civ that stands out. I'd even go further and say that basic citizen units should be equal between civs. Athens and Sparta are too strong in basic infantry with their health and promotion bonuses. If their opponent plays a basic infantry army, they have low chance to win. 

 

[king reza the great]

I mention and emphasize again,fanatics and champ cavs have no counter. Some nave people say you can counter champs with champs. But its not that true. For example for sele/persian/gaul cav champs, there is 0 counter units ( or champs) in Maury civ.

Other units like citizens or mercs ( even cav mercs) have counter in all civs, then they are ok.

Edited August 4 by king reza the great

[Deicide4u]

18 hours ago, king reza the great said:

For example for sele/persian/gaul cav champs, there is 0 counter units ( or champs) in Maury civ.

This is so wrong, Mauryans have the strongest champ unit in the game.

Spoiler

You just destroy his Taverns Temples before he has a chance to mass Fanatics, easy. A23 stats, btw.

/s

Edited August 5 by Deicide4u
Needed to clarify something

[guerringuerrin]

1 hour ago, Dakara said:

Hi, i don't like age of empire for this reason, too much counter of counter. 0ad fight are cool,you don't need too much knowledge. 

I don't support a hard counter style like aoe2 but right now meta is whoever masses champcav first wins (unless he bad micro/noobs ofc) turning almost every game in a champcav race, if you'd have some kind of counter or better soldiers to hold it, player would aim for other strategies. 

but we can disagree on that ofc

[king reza the great]

2 hours ago, Deicide4u said:

This is so wrong, Mauryans have the strongest champ unit in the game.

  Reveal hidden contents

You just destroy his Taverns Temples before he has a chance to mass Fanatics, easy. A23 stats, btw.

Ok tell me with which unit you counter champ spear cavs of persian with hero and 20% more hp bonus?  

Yudha is for destroying buildings. It even cant counter normal units well.

Edited August 4 by king reza the great

[Deicide4u]

6 minutes ago, king reza the great said:

Ok tell me with which unit you counter champ spear cavs of persian with hero and 20% more hp bonus?  

My post was mostly sarcastic...Oh, well 

Champion spearmen. Or mass regular spearmen with upgrades. CS spearmen cost 50 F/ 50 W. Champion cavalry costs a LOT more. Fight for map control and force an engagement. Champion Cavalry can pick fights, but not when you're the one who controls Metal mines on a map.

[king reza the great]

4 minutes ago, Deicide4u said:

My post was mostly sarcastic...Oh, well 

Champion spearmen. Or mass regular spearmen with upgrades. CS spearmen cost 50 F/ 50 W. Champion cavalry costs a LOT more. Fight for map control and force an engagement. Champion Cavalry can pick fights, but not when you're the one who controls Metal mines on a map.

Here we are talking about countering units not game play. Any unit in 0ad should have counters.

[Deicide4u]

5 minutes ago, king reza the great said:

Any unit in 0ad should have counters.

Every unit has strengths and weaknesses. Spearmen are basic units. Average speed, low cost and mostly pierce damage in melee but can counter cavalry. Trainable in the Village phase. Useless against rams and buildings, somewhat bad against other infantry.

Champion cavalry are late game power units. Fast, mobile and powerful, but very expensive to mass. Requires City phase to unlock. Also needs upgrades to resist most of the bonus damage from spearmen, so it requires even more metal to work.

Unless metal grows on trees in your games, I don't see how this unit can be considered broken.

[Dakara]

15 minutes ago, Deicide4u said:

Every unit has strengths and weaknesses. Spearmen are basic units. Average speed, low cost and mostly pierce damage in melee but can counter cavalry. Trainable in the Village phase. Useless against rams and buildings, somewhat bad against other infantry.

Champion cavalry are late game power units. Fast, mobile and powerful, but very expensive to mass. Requires City phase to unlock. Also needs upgrades to resist most of the bonus damage from spearmen, so it requires even more metal to work.

Unless metal grows on trees in your games, I don't see how this unit can be considered broken.

we don't play the same game i guess. You have easy 2 or 3 metal mine in your territory. 

Champ cav are broken and they have absolute no weak point! they are tank, high hp, high attack. They have a big cost effiency combine to mobility. Speciality persians and sélucid

some civ can litterality don't play against them.

we need nerf champ cav by one solution (cost, tankiness, damage, building training change or another idea)

Edited August 4 by Dakara

[king reza the great]

47 minutes ago, Deicide4u said:

Every unit has strengths and weaknesses. Spearmen are basic units. Average speed, low cost and mostly pierce damage in melee but can counter cavalry. Trainable in the Village phase. Useless against rams and buildings, somewhat bad against other infantry.

Champion cavalry are late game power units. Fast, mobile and powerful, but very expensive to mass. Requires City phase to unlock. Also needs upgrades to resist most of the bonus damage from spearmen, so it requires even more metal to work.

Unless metal grows on trees in your games, I don't see how this unit can be considered broken.

They are broken because spearmen cant counter them

U can get metal easily like how u get wood easily from trees

Also with abit turtling u can spam them

[guerringuerrin]

3 hours ago, Deicide4u said:

Every unit has strengths and weaknesses. Spearmen are basic units. Average speed, low cost and mostly pierce damage in melee but can counter cavalry. Trainable in the Village phase. Useless against rams and buildings, somewhat bad against other infantry.

Champion cavalry are late game power units. Fast, mobile and powerful, but very expensive to mass. Requires City phase to unlock. Also needs upgrades to resist most of the bonus damage from spearmen, so it requires even more metal to work.

Unless metal grows on trees in your games, I don't see how this unit can be considered broken.

You should see how champ cav performs on a TG, and how is the dynamic we talking about. they really need a nerf or some kind of counter unit. its absurd that some of them can wipe out pikes like nothing

[Deicide4u]

6 hours ago, guerringuerrin said:

You should see how champ cav performs on a TG,

Sure. Do you have any replays to share?

EDIT:

One subtle nerf would be to separate the upgrades into infantry-only and cavalry-only. Weapon upgrades would further be split between melee and ranged weapon upgrades. Additionally, make the upgrades more expensive.

Essentially, as they were in A23.

Spoiler

Left to right: infantry melee weapons, infantry ranged weapons, cavalry melee weapons, cavalry ranged weapons, infantry armor, cavalry armor.

 

Edited August 5 by Deicide4u
Added the part about the upgrades

[Player of 0AD]

Why would fanatics be OP? They are very expensive due to their high food cost. Also, temples are expensive and otherwise not as useful as a barracks. 

Fanatics have low armor and are not that fast.

Also, if they would be OP, we would have seen them much more often.

[Fabius]

22 hours ago, king reza the great said:

Besides the champion cavaliers, Fanatics are by far the most broken units in the game. Seriously, these units are insanely overpowered and hard to counter. Can anyone name a unit that can reliably stop Fanatics? I bet you can’t.

They run fast, deal massive damage, and don’t even require metal to produce, which makes spamming them nonstop super easy. The only thing the developers could have done to stop the spamming of this unit was to add metal as a required resource. Unfortunately, they didn’t do that

There are players abusing this by spamming Fanatics in P2, and it’s ruining the game for everyone. I wouldn’t be surprised if some ecobot or clever Celt player designed this unit to exploit the game by spamming them relentlessly for an unfair advantage.

What do you guys think? Any ideas on how to properly nerf or counter these broken units? I believe adding metal as a required resource to build them would be an effective way to balance this unit. Moreover all cav champs should be nerfed for sure.
We’ve already banned Champion Cavaliers from our games, and Fanatics definitely need to be banned as well. If the developers don’t nerf these units in the next alpha update and keep introducing unfair, broken units, we’ll have no choice but to keep banning them from our matches to maintain fair gameplay.

How many games have you lost to a swarm of fanatics? A once off curb stomp does not render any one unit OP. Also champion cavalry are nowhere near as OP as they where in the past, Selucids and Persians are an outlier on that point as they are a lot stronger than the regular, but that is by design since it has a historical basis. As for counters, basic spearmen are functional against them, you need a numbers advantage though and preferably some champions of your own to stiffen the line, whatever form they take. I have personally annihilated about 100 champion Macedonian lancers using just mass veteran Triari and consular guard, so it is quite doable. And sure they are speedy, but ultimately half of this is a skill issue and not the fault of the game itself. Learn to make the most of what one has to hand. If something is really obnoxious like those Iberian fire cav in previous Alphas then sure fix them, but otherwise just leave it alone as is.

[Servo]

I spectated a high level team game where I saw that fanatics are very OP. That player used 4 temple and attacking wave after wave of fanatics. 
Food imo is not really a problem on the game once you reached T2. In fact they are used to barter resources like stone and metal most of the time. 

[chrstgtr]

2 hours ago, Servo said:

Food imo is not really a problem on the game once you reached T2. In fact they are used to barter resources like stone and metal most of the time. 
 

Food is the slowest resource to collect, easiest to interrupt, hardest to defend, and most difficult to relocate. 

If you regularly have too much food it’s because your economy is mismanaged.

I agree with @Player of 0AD here. 

Fana don’t do particularly well in inf fights. But they shine in games where the enemy goes cav. If i know anything about Reza, he’s complaining because a handful of fana were able to easily defeat his much larger cav army. This is at least what happened last time I went fana against him. 

[Deicide4u]

1 hour ago, chrstgtr said:

If i know anything about Reza, he’s complaining because a handful of fana were able to easily defeat his much larger cav army.

Surprise, surprise. A unit good against cavalry is cost-effectively killing a lot of cavalry.

In other news, water is wet. 

[king reza the great]

10 hours ago, chrstgtr said:

Food is the slowest resource to collect, easiest to interrupt, hardest to defend, and most difficult to relocate. 

If you regularly have too much food it’s because your economy is mismanaged.

I agree with @Player of 0AD here. 

Fana don’t do particularly well in inf fights. But they shine in games where the enemy goes cav. If i know anything about Reza, he’s complaining because a handful of fana were able to easily defeat his much larger cav army. This is at least what happened last time I went fana against him. 

Exactly what you say about me is wrong. Im just want a balanced game.

As i said already nothing can counter mass fanatics. Its not only about cavs.

Moreover what u mentioned about fanatics which able to kill a large group of cavs, which require too much metal, is a other bug of the game. 

And also, why fanatics doesnt require metal like other champs? letting players easily make a mass of champs and abusing them? Making a good eco for mass fanatics is simple. Dont tell me not all able to do that.

 

[TheCJ]

1 hour ago, king reza the great said:

And also, why fanatics doesnt require metal like other champs?

Because they have 3 hack and 4 pierce resistance less? So for every 1 pierce dmg (which is by far the most relevant type) a normal champion spearman takes, the fanatic takes 1.5 ...

Edited August 6 by TheCJ

[TheCJ]

Also metal is gathered just as quickly as food.

120f 100w takes 240s+133s=373s to gather.

80f 60w 80m takes 160s+80s+160s=400s to gather.

 

So the ratio is pretty much that you can get the resources for 13 normal champ infantry in the time you can get the resources for 14 fanatics. 14 fanatics get decimated by 13 normal champs.