Maceman Cataphract + Archer Cataphract Mod by Yekaterina

[Yekaterina]

I made a mod (my first attempt to mod) that gives some civs additional cataphract types, in the hope of increasing the types of strategies available. Maceman cataphracts offer high crush damage and extreme anti-cavalry abilities, but at the cost of dealing  almost no damage to infantry and relatively weak armour. This is to reflect the anti-cataphract tactic of using a club to bash enemy cataphracts' helmets used by the Parthians and Sassanids. Their crush damage means they can also be used as a siege weapon. Due to the short length of clubs and agility of infantry units, they do very little damage; 1 maceman champion cannot take out 1 spearman. Persians and Seleucids can train these champion units from their stables after researching unlock champion tech. Having access to this unit helps them to assert dominance in the cavalry department and effective ban cavalry from other civs.  However, their exact stats are yet to be determined; by default I gave them some pretty extreme values to emphasise my point. Therefore I would like to request the balancing advisors @Lion.Kanzen @Player of 0AD @maroder etc to help me determine their stats.  

Meanwhile, to strengthen Rome, I gave them an archer cataphract. These units are extremely agile, well-armoured and have a long range, but do little damage (9.5 pierce per second) and are quite inaccurate. Rome learnt this technique from the Parthians after the defeat at Carrhae. They have very short loading time, so they can fire as soon as you order, unlike normal archers who take 700ms to prepare. This unit is designed to be a skirmish force + anti-elephant unit instead of meatshield, although they can survive for quite long under fire. You can troll enemy infantry by drawing circles around them with these and sniping any weak targets. They take quite long to kill an unit but I managed to take out 30 Roman sword champs with 10 of these without any loss. 

Here is the mod: 

 

cataphract mod.zip

[Yekaterina]

New update: fixed models

Please test this out

cataphract mod2.zip

[maroder]

first feedback:

I now you gave them extreme stats to showcase a point, put it would be better to start from realistic values.

So their speed of should be similar to other cavalry, probably even slower due to their heavy armor. Yours are way to fast The same goes for the attack repetition rate and basically all other values as well. At the moment they are just superhumans. Try to stick to the values that are used in the other champion cav templates.

[Yekaterina]

Thank you for your feedback, @maroder. 

I will decrease their walk speed to 1.4, the average value for calvary. 

For attack speed, I lowered the damage per strike, so that rate of damage is constant. But yes, I will give it a more reasonable value as now they look as if they have mental health issues.

No more 25x counter. Maybe 5x. But cavs are resistant to crush, so that might be too much nerf.

[maroder]

I mean hard counters are ok when they prevent that you would otherwise have to crank up the regular damage values, but yes it should probably not be 25x

Edited May 10, 2021 by maroder

[Lion.Kanzen]

 This will be very useful for Parthians.

[sternstaub]

On 09/05/2021 at 2:02 PM, Yekaterina said:

I made a mod (my first attempt to mod) that gives some civs additional cataphract types, in the hope of increasing the types of strategies available.

Nice  i like a bit more unit diversity

On 09/05/2021 at 9:22 PM, maroder said:

So their speed of should be similar to other cavalry, probably even slower due to their heavy armor

Yes. This also makes sense from a (my?) balance point of view because they are vulnerable to infantry. Inf should be able to somehow keep up with them in battle.

Sounds like a "tide-turner" unit to me, who can attack cavalry when they are engaged into fight? If they were slower than average, then this would be a proper usage of the heavy cavalry, right?

Edited February 28, 2023 by sternstaub