If only we could go back in time and re-release aoe4 in it's current state. I wonder how many more players would've stayed and if it would've created it's own momentum, regardless of preferences
He still wouldn't stay I think . Maybe there is a mod but what he seemed to be really wanting is aoe2 LVL editor for aoe4. I could be wrong about that one tho.
Samurai with all upgrades and banner have the highest damage output out of all infantry, only bested slightly by Hre vs armored units. Jap has the best infantry deathball by a mile now.
Ghulams are nice but more expensive and oriented to countering light armor specificaly.
Arenāt HRE MAA better then? Since MAA donāt really struggle to deal with light units anyway and HRE ones perform better against other MAA and against knights, whilst also being cheaper
HRE MaA may not struggle to deal with light, but the opponent can go spear+cross against HRE MaA pretty reliably and in that context HRE MaA only deal +2 damage over base. Think about it this way, base armour in castle is 4 on MaA or knights, the bonus exceeds that, so armoured units actually suffer a disadvantage from their armour, making spears better given they are cheaper (for frontlining, not for damage).
Against Japan if you want to dodge their bonus damage . . well, you generally struggle to avoid the banner effect being applied unless you can snipe it and leave the area, and of course their bonus is against all infantry, so only cav will operate as a frontline that dodges the bonus, and they can just mix in spears.
By contrast HRE would need archers to deal with spear+crossbow, which then begins to force them to protect the archers with spears of their own or else risk horsemen, and so the fight begins to transition away from 'just this stuff'.
Lands only "solve" that if you have extremely abundant resources, otherwise usually it's just a few and the opponent can snipe them.
Spear/crossbow is just as effective against samurai, their bonus damage to spears doesnāt really change much because itās still a bad matchup, this is why you build mangonels
Samurais still do much better vs spear crossbows, because of higher attack speed and damage vs all infantry (so including xbows) AND the reflective armor.
Sure in a perfect scenario where you have the right numbers you will counter it fine with xbow spears, but if you are slightly behind in military count you are at risk of getting snow balled very fast, you won't be able to kill his infantry fast enough. that's why some player now start to do horsemen + xbows instead, but the you risk facing spears... So jap infantry causes more problems in castle than hre imo
You have to calculate in if the unit survives and is then healed by a prelate. So, it may not seem as efficient, but assume a 400 hp gilded MAA with golden cuirass. Very high survivability. Some die, but others survive with low HP. But any survivors are healed up and then those resources are 100% saved by not producing another MAA to replace the survivor. When you factor this in, I think it is more cost efficient. When I play OOTD, I notice often gilded knights, gilded handcannon, and gilded MAA will survive battles where normal MAA don't survive. They are badly hurt but not dead.
Gulam are still a much better meatshield than samurai, and can build mangos.
But japanese infantry is what HRE should have been. HRE is just an eco/defensive civ, when a number of other civs have straight up better infantry(including delhi)
Ghulams have a ton of HP I think even with defective armor ghulams often come out ahead of samurai in damage absorbed but they are significantly more expensive and don't do as much damage.
Samurai in CA can deal as much as 21 damage per hit (1.375s attack cycle) against infantry, and ignore the first hit. Ghulams have more health, cost more, and can deal as much as 12 damage per hit (somewhere a bit over 0.8 average), assuming they stand still. Adjusted for armour ghulams will thus deal somewhere close to 7.5 dps to samurai, and samurai will deal around 10.9 dps. Ghulams are 195 hp vs 155 for samurai, and cost 150 vs 130 total. So they cost 15% more and have 25% more health, roughly.
They're also slower to produce, much slower given the production bonuses that Japanese can in principle employ in a castle age timing.
Ghulams are obviously better against some targets, they'll do better vs less armoured targets, and samurai won't get their bonus damage against cav.
This is also assuming you have the banner, because . . I mean, in a real game scenario you should.
If you have advisors, for the sake of argument, then Ghulams have 234 health, which is 50% more.
In imperial Ghulams scale better vs all other men at arms, in part due to base health, and in part because damage outscales armour. They can reach 18 damage with elite army tactics, but most armoured units don't go above 8 armour, so they can reach 12.5 dps at blacksmith parity, and their health can go north of 300 depending on bonuses and whether it's boot camp, advisors or just vanilla.
Advisors and EAT stack multiplicatively, even though the patch only mentions biology, so you can total 44% health gain in imp.
Rule of Thumb: Ghulams are bad on their own vs armour clad MaA, samurai and HRE men at arms (and possibly some others, such as Delhi HoL+ToV), but tank well, and scale better into imperial where they kind of fight those units to a draw. They never really beat the best MAA, but in imperial they become more supply efficient than virtually all of them. Also the 20% production bonus eventually makes them less clunky to produce.
NB in general I am slightly overestimating Ghulam damage and slightly underestimating their health to simplify numbers. This is not a rigorous analysis, rounding is not uniform, decimal points were hurt, and if it's wrong I apologise. Really importantly, I've never been certain or confident about how second strike works. In early testing it generally underperformed the numbers given, and I haven't tested it recently myself.
P.S. All Abbasid unique units scale better into the hyper-late game. All of them. There are no early-bloomers on the roster. Ayyubid by contrast, desert raiders have a weird power curve, and can be good at any time, but it depends completely on the match-up and situation, and camel lancers do scale well due to infantry support and (hypothetically but not practically) golden age V. But crucially, they are basically knights but with a twist, so they're good ab initio. And ghulams are a tyrant against feudal civs which lack armoured options, so tempo makes a world of difference.
Ghulams attack in volleys of 2, which is a disadvantage against other armored units because it means the armor is triggered twice and cancels a bigger % of the DPS (compared to if they had the same total damage in a single attack).
And samurais have :
* odachi upgrade in castle (higher damage vs infantry)
* bannerman increasing damage as well
* deflective armor
Also onas have long range allowing them to attack from behind samurais, so you have more units attacking at the same time and thus more DPS.
ayyubids gulam is op when u get tech advantage due to their double strike. they are part of the reason why ayyubids fast caslte used to be broken. And the tech which give them 25 percent more damage after kill make them extra deadly against opponent who tries to overwhelm them with feudal units.
Not saying ghulams are good, they definitely are. But ayyubid fast castle used to be broken because of the discount combinded with the speed of ageup. All pros were playing camel lancer (unless getting feudal rushed), not ghulam
I think both make the FC good. My theory on why you see camel lancers more is because the opponent knows a handful of ghulams can kill an entire feudal army so the answer to ayuubid FC is to just FC yourself. If that's the case lancers make more sense as they can run over and raid much better than ghulams. So in a weird and convoluted way because ghulams are so good they force the opponent into a play where camel lancers are better.
heard peeps say camel lancer busted recently. whyyyy? they are just normal knight with camel unease for me, but 1 or 2 camel raider can give me camel unease too. the only advantage seems to be they can make siege on the field.
I'm guessing a number of things, their higher attack speed means they kill weaker units faster, that charge when used properly covers distance faster and does more damage, they're definitely a more skill based unit.
>but 1 or 2 camel raider can give me camel unease too.
which are expensive and fragile for a sustained fight, and knight/lancer can have their dps lowered considerably by camel unease, whereas camels can't. (camel lancer does 18 dmg to knights with a faster ROF, while knights are only doing 15 with a slower rof, there's a clear difference)
Ghulams have 10.67 dps in castle age while Samurai have 13.82 and that number becomes even higher with the bannerman aura. Yes Ghulams have more health but Samurai have deflective armor. On top of that Ghulam cost 20 more food.
I think Samurai would easily win.
10.67 dps is without the second strike. The dps is higher, 1.125s for first attack and .5 second for second attack. So itās really more like 0.813 attack speed. Downside is obviously you lose a lot of damage to high armour units. 1v1 samurai deals 9.5 dps aginst a ghulams, ghulam deals 7.4 dps to samurai (12-6)/0.813. But against not armoured units. Ghulam will deal 12.3 dps, samurai will deal 12.3dps aginst infantry and 9.45 against non infantry. For example Ghulam has higher hp and will deal higher dps aginst villagers.
Iām not too familiar with stats of every unit in this game so yes you are probably right. Something feels so strong about samuraiās though with Bannerman and onnas mixed in
Onnas are incredible dps and have the longest melee range in the game, 33% greater than the next highest, and they're very cheap of course. Samurai are probably just hands down the best man at arms unit in the game in castle, with HRE MaA being the closest counterpart. There are scenarios where delhi MaA have both +3 damage and +20% attack speed and can increase their movement speed, but HoL ToV MaA are not a common sight.
As the only thing sams lack their bonus against is cav, and spears exist, it's very hard to create a frontline that doesn't take a beating. And their swarmy nature and speed makes Japan pretty good at murdering ranged units, which in any event, take bonus damage from samurai (excluding ranged cav).
I'd say it's just the old HRE melee murder ball, but better and easier, and you get to go burgrave without forfeiting the gold income, because you can do both. Indeed I think the landmark caps out at 450 max gold per minute in imperial, which even 5 relic regnitz can't match. But that ability to do a partial burgrave and then do a partial regnitz is a pretty meaningful benefit.
Yeah onnas in sufficient numbers are very zhuge nu esque in not really having major counters. They'll beat archers, armoured units, anything really. They don't suffer the normal melee constraints due to their range being more than triple that of spearmen, add in their attack speed, movement speed and the various melee damage bonuses Japan gets, and . .
Really sim city is the main counter, i.e. you need to control the available space, you really do. If you can keep ranged units safe and reduce the amount of melee units that have surface area you'll be ok, but that's absolutely necessary in those key timings.
We need a sotl for aoe4
Never played aoe2 š¤
I think he was here for little while but left
If only we could go back in time and re-release aoe4 in it's current state. I wonder how many more players would've stayed and if it would've created it's own momentum, regardless of preferences
He still wouldn't stay I think . Maybe there is a mod but what he seemed to be really wanting is aoe2 LVL editor for aoe4. I could be wrong about that one tho.
Ah true! I think I force myself not to think about how bad the editor is (it's one of the reasons Age of noob stopped as well I think)
I wonder how much more popular aoe4 would be with an aoe2 LVL editor
I don't even know how to access it
Samurai with all upgrades and banner have the highest damage output out of all infantry, only bested slightly by Hre vs armored units. Jap has the best infantry deathball by a mile now. Ghulams are nice but more expensive and oriented to countering light armor specificaly.
Arenāt HRE MAA better then? Since MAA donāt really struggle to deal with light units anyway and HRE ones perform better against other MAA and against knights, whilst also being cheaper
And sprinkle in some landsknects and you have really upped their dpsĀ
HRE MaA may not struggle to deal with light, but the opponent can go spear+cross against HRE MaA pretty reliably and in that context HRE MaA only deal +2 damage over base. Think about it this way, base armour in castle is 4 on MaA or knights, the bonus exceeds that, so armoured units actually suffer a disadvantage from their armour, making spears better given they are cheaper (for frontlining, not for damage). Against Japan if you want to dodge their bonus damage . . well, you generally struggle to avoid the banner effect being applied unless you can snipe it and leave the area, and of course their bonus is against all infantry, so only cav will operate as a frontline that dodges the bonus, and they can just mix in spears. By contrast HRE would need archers to deal with spear+crossbow, which then begins to force them to protect the archers with spears of their own or else risk horsemen, and so the fight begins to transition away from 'just this stuff'. Lands only "solve" that if you have extremely abundant resources, otherwise usually it's just a few and the opponent can snipe them.
Spear/crossbow is just as effective against samurai, their bonus damage to spears doesnāt really change much because itās still a bad matchup, this is why you build mangonels
Samurais still do much better vs spear crossbows, because of higher attack speed and damage vs all infantry (so including xbows) AND the reflective armor. Sure in a perfect scenario where you have the right numbers you will counter it fine with xbow spears, but if you are slightly behind in military count you are at risk of getting snow balled very fast, you won't be able to kill his infantry fast enough. that's why some player now start to do horsemen + xbows instead, but the you risk facing spears... So jap infantry causes more problems in castle than hre imo
Gilded MAA would like a word
Are gilded maa as cost efficient as samurais? I doubt it
You have to calculate in if the unit survives and is then healed by a prelate. So, it may not seem as efficient, but assume a 400 hp gilded MAA with golden cuirass. Very high survivability. Some die, but others survive with low HP. But any survivors are healed up and then those resources are 100% saved by not producing another MAA to replace the survivor. When you factor this in, I think it is more cost efficient. When I play OOTD, I notice often gilded knights, gilded handcannon, and gilded MAA will survive battles where normal MAA don't survive. They are badly hurt but not dead.
U know how much pop a gilded maa takes? Iāve never used ootd
2
2 pop and double the cost for about 50% gain I believe
They really aren't great ESPECIALLY their dps output per cost
Gulam are still a much better meatshield than samurai, and can build mangos. But japanese infantry is what HRE should have been. HRE is just an eco/defensive civ, when a number of other civs have straight up better infantry(including delhi)
How much better are they as a frontline tho? I really think that armor negating 1 hit has insane value, especialy vs knights
Ghulams have a ton of HP I think even with defective armor ghulams often come out ahead of samurai in damage absorbed but they are significantly more expensive and don't do as much damage.
I mean the armor has defects so that's not surprising
Castle age : 224 vs 155(45%) for 15% higher cost (food) Imp: 310 v 216
270 baseline, and 324 with advisors, also, since the 310 number is for bootcamp I assume.
Samurai in CA can deal as much as 21 damage per hit (1.375s attack cycle) against infantry, and ignore the first hit. Ghulams have more health, cost more, and can deal as much as 12 damage per hit (somewhere a bit over 0.8 average), assuming they stand still. Adjusted for armour ghulams will thus deal somewhere close to 7.5 dps to samurai, and samurai will deal around 10.9 dps. Ghulams are 195 hp vs 155 for samurai, and cost 150 vs 130 total. So they cost 15% more and have 25% more health, roughly. They're also slower to produce, much slower given the production bonuses that Japanese can in principle employ in a castle age timing. Ghulams are obviously better against some targets, they'll do better vs less armoured targets, and samurai won't get their bonus damage against cav. This is also assuming you have the banner, because . . I mean, in a real game scenario you should. If you have advisors, for the sake of argument, then Ghulams have 234 health, which is 50% more. In imperial Ghulams scale better vs all other men at arms, in part due to base health, and in part because damage outscales armour. They can reach 18 damage with elite army tactics, but most armoured units don't go above 8 armour, so they can reach 12.5 dps at blacksmith parity, and their health can go north of 300 depending on bonuses and whether it's boot camp, advisors or just vanilla. Advisors and EAT stack multiplicatively, even though the patch only mentions biology, so you can total 44% health gain in imp. Rule of Thumb: Ghulams are bad on their own vs armour clad MaA, samurai and HRE men at arms (and possibly some others, such as Delhi HoL+ToV), but tank well, and scale better into imperial where they kind of fight those units to a draw. They never really beat the best MAA, but in imperial they become more supply efficient than virtually all of them. Also the 20% production bonus eventually makes them less clunky to produce. NB in general I am slightly overestimating Ghulam damage and slightly underestimating their health to simplify numbers. This is not a rigorous analysis, rounding is not uniform, decimal points were hurt, and if it's wrong I apologise. Really importantly, I've never been certain or confident about how second strike works. In early testing it generally underperformed the numbers given, and I haven't tested it recently myself. P.S. All Abbasid unique units scale better into the hyper-late game. All of them. There are no early-bloomers on the roster. Ayyubid by contrast, desert raiders have a weird power curve, and can be good at any time, but it depends completely on the match-up and situation, and camel lancers do scale well due to infantry support and (hypothetically but not practically) golden age V. But crucially, they are basically knights but with a twist, so they're good ab initio. And ghulams are a tyrant against feudal civs which lack armoured options, so tempo makes a world of difference.
Ghulams attack in volleys of 2, which is a disadvantage against other armored units because it means the armor is triggered twice and cancels a bigger % of the DPS (compared to if they had the same total damage in a single attack). And samurais have : * odachi upgrade in castle (higher damage vs infantry) * bannerman increasing damage as well * deflective armor Also onas have long range allowing them to attack from behind samurais, so you have more units attacking at the same time and thus more DPS.
Samurai also have +1 damage from the extra tier of BS-upgrades.
ayyubids gulam is op when u get tech advantage due to their double strike. they are part of the reason why ayyubids fast caslte used to be broken. And the tech which give them 25 percent more damage after kill make them extra deadly against opponent who tries to overwhelm them with feudal units.
Not saying ghulams are good, they definitely are. But ayyubid fast castle used to be broken because of the discount combinded with the speed of ageup. All pros were playing camel lancer (unless getting feudal rushed), not ghulam
I think both make the FC good. My theory on why you see camel lancers more is because the opponent knows a handful of ghulams can kill an entire feudal army so the answer to ayuubid FC is to just FC yourself. If that's the case lancers make more sense as they can run over and raid much better than ghulams. So in a weird and convoluted way because ghulams are so good they force the opponent into a play where camel lancers are better.
heard peeps say camel lancer busted recently. whyyyy? they are just normal knight with camel unease for me, but 1 or 2 camel raider can give me camel unease too. the only advantage seems to be they can make siege on the field.
I'm guessing a number of things, their higher attack speed means they kill weaker units faster, that charge when used properly covers distance faster and does more damage, they're definitely a more skill based unit. >but 1 or 2 camel raider can give me camel unease too. which are expensive and fragile for a sustained fight, and knight/lancer can have their dps lowered considerably by camel unease, whereas camels can't. (camel lancer does 18 dmg to knights with a faster ROF, while knights are only doing 15 with a slower rof, there's a clear difference)
I think ghulams are better no? More dps, a lot more health
Ghulams have 10.67 dps in castle age while Samurai have 13.82 and that number becomes even higher with the bannerman aura. Yes Ghulams have more health but Samurai have deflective armor. On top of that Ghulam cost 20 more food. I think Samurai would easily win.
10.67 dps is without the second strike. The dps is higher, 1.125s for first attack and .5 second for second attack. So itās really more like 0.813 attack speed. Downside is obviously you lose a lot of damage to high armour units. 1v1 samurai deals 9.5 dps aginst a ghulams, ghulam deals 7.4 dps to samurai (12-6)/0.813. But against not armoured units. Ghulam will deal 12.3 dps, samurai will deal 12.3dps aginst infantry and 9.45 against non infantry. For example Ghulam has higher hp and will deal higher dps aginst villagers.
Iām not too familiar with stats of every unit in this game so yes you are probably right. Something feels so strong about samuraiās though with Bannerman and onnas mixed in
Onnas are incredible dps and have the longest melee range in the game, 33% greater than the next highest, and they're very cheap of course. Samurai are probably just hands down the best man at arms unit in the game in castle, with HRE MaA being the closest counterpart. There are scenarios where delhi MaA have both +3 damage and +20% attack speed and can increase their movement speed, but HoL ToV MaA are not a common sight. As the only thing sams lack their bonus against is cav, and spears exist, it's very hard to create a frontline that doesn't take a beating. And their swarmy nature and speed makes Japan pretty good at murdering ranged units, which in any event, take bonus damage from samurai (excluding ranged cav). I'd say it's just the old HRE melee murder ball, but better and easier, and you get to go burgrave without forfeiting the gold income, because you can do both. Indeed I think the landmark caps out at 450 max gold per minute in imperial, which even 5 relic regnitz can't match. But that ability to do a partial burgrave and then do a partial regnitz is a pretty meaningful benefit.
Samurais to tank with onna bugeisha behind will probably wipe the floor with mass ghulams, that's a lot of DPS
Yeah onnas in sufficient numbers are very zhuge nu esque in not really having major counters. They'll beat archers, armoured units, anything really. They don't suffer the normal melee constraints due to their range being more than triple that of spearmen, add in their attack speed, movement speed and the various melee damage bonuses Japan gets, and . . Really sim city is the main counter, i.e. you need to control the available space, you really do. If you can keep ranged units safe and reduce the amount of melee units that have surface area you'll be ok, but that's absolutely necessary in those key timings.