Failed Vote Change Mounted Archers / Small Archer Changes

[bobertini]

Intro / Summary

Currently MA is considered trash by most of the community, this is due to its high population requirements / costs making it more viable to not recruit MA and have more LC.

This is especially so when faced with builds with minimal archer amounts. Reality is, MA only comes into its own when faced with archer turtles, however, with the additions of the newer pally weapons. I would be expecting to see archer turtles replaced with SP/SW turtles due to the 30% def bonuses.

This would leave MA even more trash than the local trash raccoon.

What needs to be done (MA):

Make MA more viable vs the standard defence build.

What could be done (MA):

Reduce its population requirements to the same of LC and reduce its material costs to approx 200 Wood, 100 Clay, 150 Iron.

I would suggest, increasing its offensive strength from 120 to 125.

Potential other changes (Archers):

With worlds where Archers are enabled, perhaps a 5% def pally bonus could be applied? This could reduce the current 30%'s from Swords / Spears to maybe 25% each?

Tdlr: MA are trash, except vs Archers, which new pally bonuses make even rarer. A change to make them more viable for other situations is required.

Archers are still very good on their own, just in a large quantity, however, with the extra bonuses for spears and swords, I suspect a good mix of spears/swords could make archer spam less effective.

Open to thought if this gets approved x

-Rob.

 

[JawJaw]

Hi!

Thank you for your suggestion. This has been approved for voting.
It would be interesting to see the thoughts of other community members if they see any potential balancing issues with this!

 

[Mintyfresh]

I voted yes because MA needs a change but the problem with bobs suggestions is that they dont address two of the three problems that MA suffer and instead buff them in places they dont need it. I'll break it down into separate points.

Reduce its population requirements to the same of LC

Mixed on this. MA are objectively better than LC because archers are the best defense unit and they counter archers. On that basis their 5 pop vs LC 4 pop is warranted. However because people dont build archers particularly (i dont know why) that makes them in reality weaker than LC. But thats not a problem with the unit, the unit is fine by itself stat-wise its just people dont build archers and that therefore directly means archer killing units are weaker

reduce its material costs to approx 200 Wood, 100 Clay, 150 Iron.

Disagree. This is not needed and their costs have no impact on the strength of the unit.

I would suggest, increasing its offensive strength from 120 to 125.

Disagree. Their strength is fine and doesnt need increasing. The issue with the unit is not the actual combat stats.

Here are the three problems with MA and the reason that people with any gamesense dont build them:

1) Unit pop.
2) Carrying capacity.
3) Build time.

We covered the unit pop issue already. This is the smallest issue with them and its not an issue with the unit as per say but rather with peoples misconceptions with archers

Secondly, as everyone knows the more you farm the better you do in the game. If you farm 500k in a day you will beat the guy farming 300k in a day. This is true at all stages of the game. So why would i voluntarily cut my farming potential by over a third (They haul 50 compared to 80 for LC) for the sake of a minimal attack benefit vs archers? If you arent farming then this point doesnt apply to you but if you're not farming then you probably dont care about how units are balanced anyway. Even if they received attack buffs and buffs to unit pop etc I (and most i imagine) still wont use them for this reason alone

Thirdly they take too long to build. Im not certain exactly how long on a 1 speed but here are the comparisons for a 1.6 speed world:

234 seconds - LC
351 seconds - MA

Assuming in a nuke you build 3000 LC or 2400 MA then this comes to:

702,000 seconds (or 8.1 days)
842,400 seconds (or 9.75 days)

So you're basically building for nearly 2 whole days longer for MA. The gap between them for build time increases as the world speed decreases. Thats just not acceptable to me when its mid-late game and im recycling nukes around as soon as they're built. If my opponent was building pure archers then i would still roll with 75% LC because the turn-around time is a huge factor.

So what am i proposing? In short dont touch the unit stats, look instead at haul capacity and build time if you want them to be a viable unit

As for your other point:

Intro / Summary

With worlds where Archers are enabled, perhaps a 5% def pally bonus could be applied? This could reduce the current 30%'s from Swords / Spears to maybe 25% each?

I go in-depth somewhat on the strength of archers in thread here post here:

https://forum.tribalwars.net/index....ng-into-consideration-paladin-bonuses.280384/

to TLDR it archers are the best defensive unit stat-wise primarily because of their balanced def stats and additionally how weak MA are. Even If MA are buffed they'll still be the best defensive unit although not quite as strong obviously.

A lot of people have misconceptions about units and think archers are not good (omg paladin 30% swords buff) but thats not a problem with the unit. The unit itself is crazy strong thats a problem with the players who dont look properly into the game dynamics or understand the unit meta

 

[ALessonInPointWhoring]

Going from 80 capacity to 50 does not cut farming potential by over a third. Not even close.

You're ignoring all factors except one. You would need to only farm one village which had an infinite amount of resources in it for that to be true. You don't, as your hauling capacity increases you face diminishing returns as you become forced to farm a larger area and send your troops further away.

Disagree. Their strength is fine and doesnt need increasing. The issue with the unit is not the actual combat stats.

Here are the three problems with MA and the reason that people with any gamesense dont build them:

1) Unit pop.
2) Carrying capacity.
3) Build time.

Changing a units strength is for most intents and purposes the exact same thing as changing its unit pop and build time.

ie. Increasing the stats of MA by 25% has virtually the same impact as decreasing its pop usage by 20% and decreasing its build time by 20%.

Lets pretend MA have a strength of 100 and build in 2 minutes for the sake of easy math

You raise strength by 25%, they now take 5 pop, have 125 strength and still take 2 minutes to make.

They now have 62.5 strength per minute, and 25 strength per pop.

Alternatively take a MA, reduce its pop to 4. It now also has 25 strength per pop, but would have 50 strength per minute still instead of 62.5, so you'd also need to reduce its build time by 20% to bring it in line with a MA with 25% more strength.

You're arguing that something is bad, but that something nearly identical to it is somehow better. Which aspects you change matter very little, only the magnitudes matter.

 

[bobertini]

Glad some folks could do the quick maths, I researched the topic for a while last night, couldn't find any topics on it.

 

[Mintyfresh]

Going from 80 capacity to 50 does not cut farming potential by over a third. Not even close.

You're ignoring all factors except one. You would need to only farm one village which had an infinite amount of resources in it for that to be true. You don't, as your hauling capacity increases you face diminishing returns as you become forced to farm a larger area and send your troops further away.

Reducing your haul from 80-50 has the potential to cut your farming from anywhere between 0% and 37.5%. You're right in that i cannot calculate how much it will cost individuals because of unknowable variables and that 33% is on the higher end of the possible losses. Even if you take the literal average and say you lose 18.75% potential resources hauled then thats still quite detrimental

Changing a units strength is for most intents and purposes the exact same thing as changing its unit pop and build time.

But its not because reducing the unit pop and build time affects the overall nuke build in the sense that you compensate for the current build time with other units. If the strength is increased then that doesnt make the unit a better unit because its strength is already at an acceptable level. You're effectively ignoring the problems that make it a weak unit and slapping a band-aid on the problem.

In just pure number terms then yes you could argue that you can get the same results by increasing strength as reducing build times but thats not the point here. Build time is incredibly important because the only useless unit in the game is the unit that doesnt arrive on time to do the job it needs to do. I just wont use a unit that means my nuke is a day late regardless of whether it has 120 strength or 130. If you want people to use a unit then you need to fix what cause people to not use it

ie. Increasing the stats of MA by 25% has virtually the same impact as decreasing its pop usage by 20% and decreasing its build time by 20%.

Lets pretend MA have a strength of 100 and build in 2 minutes for the sake of easy math

You raise strength by 25%, they now take 5 pop, have 125 strength and still take 2 minutes to make.

They now have 62.5 strength per minute, and 25 strength per pop.

Alternatively take a MA, reduce its pop to 4. It now also has 25 strength per pop, but would have 50 strength per minute still instead of 62.5, so you'd also need to reduce its build time by 20% to bring it in line with a MA with 25% more strength.

You're arguing that something is bad, but that something nearly identical to it is somehow better. Which aspects you change matter very little, only the magnitudes matter.

I havent speculated potential numbers. Maths is not a strong point for me so i would not be able to say what would be a good balance adjustment and i deliberately did not attempt to do so. Im not going to debate this point with you because these are made up numbers that you invented to refute your own interpretation of my suggested balance changes. Im not sure if that is because you deliberately wanted to misunderstand what i was saying or because you genuinely dont understand the difference between buffing unit strength and reducing build time

 

[ALessonInPointWhoring]

There's really not a difference between them.

You can come out with the any end outcome by changing any 2 of the three listed factors.

Strength per population matters. Strength per build-time matters, but you can reach the ideal ratio by altering any 2 of the 3 variables.

I don't agree that archers are the best defensive unit either though, that title goes to spears.

I've simulated thousands of various defensive builds over the years, and while archers aren't useless and it is worthwhile to build some I do not feel it is worthwhile to ever make them comprise the majority of your defense like it is for spears.

Feel free to post what defense you use if you feel otherwise, since debating how good a unit is without the actual results of using said unit to compare is fairly pointless.

 

[DeletedUser]

I agree that mounted archers need a change, however this is not the one that I would personally do.

Archers are, by I think most people's standards, the second best defensive unit in the game after the spear. You could make debate here for heavy cavalry in archer worlds, but I'd put them in 3rd. I think their efficiency in terms of building time is about 91% of that of spears, which is what mostly matters past earlygame in pretty much every world asides from a world with limited/no hauls and no P2W like W100. They are stronger in a theoretical full build, but then again swords are also stronger than heavy cavalry, yet most still prefer heavy cavalry due to their utility and replenishment rate. Archers are still strong and more than good enough that you can sacrifice spear building for extra strength through building archers, but even in a world without any MA to check them, they'd still play second fiddle to the spear. I know there will be endless debate about these things so I will leave them for now.

What the main problem is now is not their haul carrying capacity is shit. MA aren't made to be farming units in the same way swords, heavy cavalry and axes aren't. Yes you can farm with them, but you can farm with most units. Changing something that is irrelevant to the idea of what MA are meant to do is a bad buff. They serve a different purpose, to counter archers and are a niche unit in the same way that the heavy cavalry is. The problem is that MA suck at their job, to the point where it's inefficient in the vast majority of circumstances to build them. Most people advocating MA say it's for that one guy who just spams archers or other such farfetched scenarios.

What you want is that golden spot, where MA do a better job of countering archers but do not become powerful to the point where there is no point building light cavalry. The buff proposed I don't believe does this and at best makes Mounted Archer/light cavalry mixes optimal due to being able to equalise Iron and Timber imbalances easier and place the Archer in the same place that MA are in currently. Furthermore, most builds that emphasise pure speed are MA weak and building MA punishes not only archer building but also quick defensive builds.

Take for example the following build of:

9230 spears
1795 heavy cavalry

Which is the the number of units you'd build defensively if you wanted 20k Pop using barracks and stables simultaneously in the shortest amount of time.

That translates into:

497450 General Def
558950 Cavalry Def
507700 Archer Def

I generally wanted to illustrate this point that most optimal builds are weaker on the archer defence side naturally due to the build time and stats of the units. Versus a pure Spear/Hc build with the aim of increasing defensive strength per hour the most, it's actually optimal to build Mounter Archers with the suggested improvement to counter something that contains no archers at all. Pretty much as Nauzhror says, this increases MA's strength per pop from 24 to 31.25. It's an absurdly large buff. If you were to apply that to LC, they'd be as strong as axemen pound for pound.

For me this has always been simple:

Add 5-10 points onto the attack strength.

That's it.

I don't think it needs more than that, just make them a slightly better investment so there is more of a balance between building archers in bulkier builds and building mounted archers to counter them, to a point where one does not overwhelm the other.

PS: I'd argue that the sword is in nearly as bad a place as the mounted archer in archer worlds, but they have their own place in non-archer worlds as well as as a sniping unit so it is not like you will never see them.

 

[Mintyfresh]

I think we're probably going to have to agree to disagree although i genuinely dont understand why anyone would build MA and gimp their farming potential. I guess we're just playing the game in different ways?

It comes down to this when building a nuke. LC or HC or MA. Nobody will seriously build nukes with HC (a topic for another time) so you're left with MA vs LC for the Cav strength in your nuke. LC is the clear winner every single time. This is because they fulfil two roles at once. Increasing your income and attacking. Yes MA are not designed to be 'farming machines'. This was a design flaw.Their only direct competition is LC. LC can farm and nuke effectively whereas if all you do is increase MA strength by 5-10 they can still only do 1 job - nuke. Whereas LC can nuke and farm. Nobody seriously playing long term is going to build them period.

So if you dont want to increase their farming potential you need to make them more attractive in other ways. Slapping a number onto their attack strength does not fix the core issues with the unit. Their "job" is to kill archers. People arent building archers because of the common and incorrect idea that swords are the better unit to complement spears in their def builds. MAs job role is redundant not because of the design of the unit but players playing "wrong". Logically to me the next step make them more attractive units by increasing their haul capacity this will encourage people to use them more.

I would go into detail that the 'fastest' def build is a pretty poor one and people shouldnt be doing it but thats subjective and i dont think anyone would pay attention anyway. If you're racing to fill your farm cap literally as quick as possible then you're doing it wrong (defensively speaking, offensive is different).

Plus thats not how def stats are calculated for the defender. Offensively its added together to make a total but defensively it takes an average of all the units in the village then uses that for its calculations. This is why you should always move out your nukes from a vil when its attacked because it will include the offensive units defensive stats when doing the average and reduce the defensive strength of the village. Correct me if im wrong here but i believe thats how it works

As for the spears / archers debate i see it like this:

A good DV is like a sandwich. Spears are the bread and archers are your favourite filling of choice.

You cant have a sandwich without bread, its not a sandwich. You can have a sandwich without your favorite filling but why tf would you do that if you have your filling available? Its now a sub-par sandwich.

Spears are essential to a DV, you cannot build a balanced def village without spears but archers are definitely the strongest complimentary choice.

 

[ALessonInPointWhoring]

I think their efficiency in terms of building time is about 91% of that of spears, which is what mostly matters past earlygame in pretty much every world asides from a world with limited/no hauls and no P2W like W100.

This seems backwards to me. When you have 1-5 D villages build-time is of pretty significant importance, much less so when you have hundreds of D villages. HC get less useful as a world progresses IMO, not more useful. The only way I can see someone arguing that build-time matters more past early-game is if they're the type of person to go 80% offense or something silly.

 

[ALessonInPointWhoring]

Plus thats not how def stats are calculated for the defender. Offensively its added together to make a total but defensively it takes an average of all the units in the village then uses that for its calculations. This is why you should always move out your nukes from a vil when its attacked because it will include the offensive units defensive stats when doing the average and reduce the defensive strength of the village. Correct me if im wrong here but i believe thats how it works

Definitely doesn't work that way. I've frequently intentionally defended with my lc at the one village stage because the lc I lose by doing so is more rapidly rebuilt than the defense I save would have been.

You do often lose more population than if you'd dodged the lc, but you definitely lose less defense than otherwise. Since the lc losses will be rebuilt in stable and the defense in barracks, it can often result in an overall faster rebuild.

I'm certainly not proposing people make lc as defense in anything but an emergency scenario, but at startup the best defense you can make in your stable is lc up until the point you can make hc so if you're ever in a position where you need as much defense as possible in a set amount of time to avoid being rimmed for example it can be worth it to produce lc for the purpose of defense.

 

[twenty-five]

what's your lc count btw?!

Edit: Also those hating on MA farming, they have smaller loot than lc and thus are better for microfarming. Think about it!

 

[mch123]

If mounted archers sole purpose is to counter archers... the problem is with archers not mounted archers.

w101 - 1.18M spears, 0.98M swords, 0.074M archers.
w99 - 10.6M spears, 7.4M swords, 2.5M archers
w98 - 47.5M spears, 30.3M sword, 17.8M archers
w96 - 110M spears, 49.7M swords, 68M archers

As you can see, until you get to late game, no one is building archers and therefore mounted archers feel worthless. By that point is it worth changing your build anyway?

You need to buff archers early game to get players to consider building them and by extension mounted archers. What is the issue with archers early game? Research costs, recruitment time and cost per unit. Basically you don't want to waste resources when you can get most of the benefit with swords and spears.

When comparing archers, you have to compare 2 archers to 1 spear + 1 sword as that's the effective opposite. They cost about 64% more and take longer to build. 2 archers give 100 general and 80 cavalry defence while 1 spear + 1 sword give 65 and 70 respectively. A 53% and 14% defence boost respectively vs the spear and sword combo.

It's a net boost of 33.3% costing 64% more. The math doesn't make sense and people instinctively know this.

As mentioned before, with the paladin boosts (and more commonly item boosts that are weighted) to spears and swords, no one is building archers early game and by extension mounted archers.

To really put the nail in the coffin, players are heavier on cavalry offence early game for farming purposes. Archers are slightly stronger against general offence which further worsens their effect early game.

I'm not sure what I would do about this problem though. To boost archer defence is dangerous as the entire game is designed around going on the offence and conquering players. Making defence more powerful than offence in a 1:1 fight could really break the early tempo of the game. That's why we have tribes to share the defensive burdens and stack up against rounds of offence.

So with that in mind I would probably reduce archer general defence to 40 and boost cavalry defence to 55 or 60. A net 5-10 point gain and in favour of cavalry defence to help solve early game issues while still keeping them more expensive and slower to build. It may even need to be boosted further. Spears and swords should keep their strength of being a faster source of defence when under attack and rebuilding.

By mid-game however, swords will be replaced with heavy cavalry for the rebuild time - as you can keep 2 queues running.

That's my 2 cents anyway.

 

[ALessonInPointWhoring]

Making defence more powerful than offence in a 1:1 fight could really break the early tempo of the game. That's why we have tribes to share the defensive burdens and stack up against rounds of offence.

Defense is already stronger than offense in a 1:1 fight under a lot of circumstances.

Offense is stronger per build-time, defense is stronger per population.

I agree however that the last thing the game needs is defense getting buffed.

 

[saad748]

I think both units need to be modified a little. Decreasing the population of MA to be equal to LC, i.e. 4 and reducing the cost of archer to be 70-80 wood instead of 100. I think these changes can increase the utilization of both the units in the game.
The training time of both units is another reason, why they are under utilized, but I think reducing them will just make them OP. Albeit a slight reduction might help in more utilization.

 

[JawJaw]

Idea did not reach the required percentage of votes and is therefore rejected.