With the recent change to the Horse Archer skill, now this one troop is getting it's own skill, and it's a very important part of everyone's armies. All our heroes didn't suddently get 6 new levels, or didn't became easier to level up. A new skill is basically 6 complete levels for a hero.
All this means we are forced to make choices for our armies, leading to only one direction: replacing the fighter skill for ranged archery. With no fighter skill, royal guards, heavy royal guards are becoming much less interresting and are better replaced with more cavalry which only means one thing, many people will play with only horse armies, especially if we want to compete with the other top players/orders.
I don't like this change because of all the side effects it causes, but it seems selling a lot of Holy Indulgence artifacts and people paying to reset the skills of their heroes was a good burst of money.
If the decision to keep this skill is definitive, something needs to be done to bring back the balance, either make all adventure gives a lot more experience because 6 more levels is huge, or complete review the experience curve for heroes, even both but that's not what want as a solution.
Here's what I think should be done: Bring back Horse Archer as a cavalry, but with either of these 2 suggestions:
1- Bring it back as a cavalry unit, like it was before. (And change their background to match the color of cavalry units.)
2- Since it's a unit that uses both a horse, and a bow, make it use 50% of the cavalry skill, and 50% of the archery skill and make it clear in the description that they only use half of each skill. (Also change the color of it's background to half green and half purple to match their mixed style.)
3- I'm adding a third suggestion that is just the opposite of the 1st suggestion, make them an archery skill using the archery skill.
No matter what you decide to do, this situation needs to be adressed. I like how we can have diversified armies, but if we want to play at higher level, there's only one way to go, cavalry armies and this change just confirmed this. My interest with the game is going down and I know I'm not the only one. It's not too late to change this back.
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bigelittlee
в: 04 Dec 2013 [09:22]
i think making a skill for 1 troop was only done to make sure we all build horse armies. i feel i am forced to forget strategy now and only build horse armies and let the person with the most hired mercs win, real exciting.I can say that i do not like this change and has lowered my interest in playing this strategy game. I do not know what the answer is but having a skill for 1 troop seems like a terrible idea to me.
schnitzer90
Модератор
в: 08 Dec 2013 [00:23]
исправлено: 08 Dec 2013 [00:25]
This whole horse archer topic is really interesting and there are a lot of different opinions. I'd like to add mine to the discussion:
First of all, I want to say that I'm glad that the developers have finally addressed this topic, there has been so much confusion among new players and even some seasoned veterans (background colour; cavalry vs. archery; ...). The solution that they've implemented now might not be perfect and it's definetly not making everybody happy - not that any solution could achieve that - but it is a clear solution! There's no more confusion.
I remember a time when it was literally impossible to get a "perfect" hero, because the highest level heroes where at about level 40. There wasn't enough levels on most of your heroes to get all "useful" abilities. One had to make decisions, which leads me to my next point:
A strategy game has to force players to make decisions! Strategy means thinking of a plan, making decisions and weighing possibilities.
=> To put it in a nutshell, decision-making is part of a strategy game and level-shortage on heroes isn't really new in the game.
1. Cavalry-heavy armies were basically standard for a long time. It just comes with the amount of mercenary points that the bigger players have at their disposal. I don't like it either, but it's just where the game pushes the bigger players.
2. You do know that you do not have to miss any ability in your army? It's a matter of how many heroes you are willing to put in a single army of yours.
Ambergames gave away holy indulgences for free and gave a big discount on the resetting of abilities. I wonder how many players actually bought one or more of this artifact or did use the reset option. I doubt many players did.
But I would absolutely agree if you said that we players deserve to know about such changes some time prior to their implemantation!
I haven't seen many new features completely taken back by the developers. The skill will most likely remain, but only time will tell.
See above. Level-shortage has been part of the game before and there is a way around having to miss certain abilities.
The background colour is a problem. It should really go with the skill, so ranged cavalry needs their own color.
For the sake of new players, please do not do this. I can see the confusion (among new players) growing already, if this would be implemented.
I agree with you, I'd like to have different army compositions, too. That being said, I don't think that the ranged cavalry skill is the problem that is standing in the way of this goal, but other, far more impoartant things cause the being-forced-to-get-cavalry-armies situation.
I don't know what the answer is either and neither do I think that a skill for one unit is a good idea. It's a better idea however than having the big consufion that we had before and it might be a step to force players to think about how to spread the abilities among their heroes. Shortage always boost creativity!
It is not a step in the direction of more diversity of army compositions, but if I'm perfectly honest nothing that was recently introduced was a step in that direction. Maybe the introduction of the Livonian Auxiliary is an exception, but since they are as fast as norman archers, they actually still fit pretty well.
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Sorry for the wall of text, but I wanted to do justice to the topic which has many sides.
