If horsemen get nerfed

[TheMeInTeam]

City attack penalty has precedent, but IMO they need a base str nerf instead.

In my LP I was absolutely smacking the likes of longswords and muskets (sometimes even pikes!) silly with HORSEMEN. Not knights! With the % boosts available in this game, it's often possible to see units at double their advertised str, making even their direct counters fear them. Horses certainly should have their movement because it defines the role of the unit in-game and in real history, but they're simply too-strong outright.

City attack penalty has precedent but makes less sense. MOST foot soldiers were pretty awful vs walls/castles too, and without those things being on horseback in a city could be an active advantage.

 

[bryanw1995]

Horsemen hit and run attacks are very close to cheese. So "cut down their movement point"s is what I voted for.

Alternatively, Spearmen and Pikemen are WEAK and could use a boost.

a 2pt penalty to horse/CC would probably be just about perfect. they'd still be very strong, but you would probably build some spears/archers/warriors to take out enemy spears at least.

@themeinteam: yeah, my last game I had 10 horses near capital, it was basically over by turn 80. current game I'm playing with the balance mods, but I have 6 horses developed by turn 40. here we go again...

 

[Soronery]

Honestly I don't think horses need to be nerfed. On higher difficulties the enemy gets quite a few spearmen. Spears counter horses hard. No, they do not need to be stronger vs horses. They get +100% vs horses. So basically 14 strength. If you want to kill spears with horses, you're going to have to take heavy damage. Maybe if they are alone in open terrain you can get them without suffering too much. The main problem with spears and pikes is that they suck balls vs anything other than horses.

Horses are good against one thing...killing units in open terrain. In rough terrain they are practically useless.

 

[zimmah]

they should just be weaker to walled cities. other then that. they're fine.

 

[PawelS]

I support the idea of a city attack penalty.

 

[pi-r8]

-1 strength, -1 move, remove flatland penalty, and make iron visible at mining.

 

[E66man]

...and make iron visible at mining.

I would wish for this as a change to the game in general.

 

[wurstburst]

I don't think horsemen are fine because they are bad against their +era counter (which they are). I think they are fine because they really aren't any more powerful than going for early swords or, ffs, BC rifles. In fact they are a lot weaker than BC rifles. In other words, I think horsemen are not quite as good as their contemporary, swordsmen. They are a little easier, a little more plentiful, but ultimately the weaker choice, I think, if you have to clear out a Pangaea on high difficulty and a standard or harder map.

I understand and can appreciate your statement that a rifle rush may be superior to the horse/knight track long term. But your statement that horsemen are worse than swordsmen as contemporaries is way over the top and not supported by the facts.

-Horsemen take less tech investment to research 208 beakers to get to HBR vs 253 to get iron working
-horses appear at animal husbandry 38 beakers into the tech path. Iron doesn't appear until the full 253 beakers are done. If you don't have iron then, you are in deep trouble. If horses don't appear after those 38 beakers (which I've yet to have happen to me over many games), you can go the sword path and only be a bit behind where you'd be otherwise. Taking into account research rates and the time needed to either mine the iron or move a settler to settle on iron, swordsmen come out about a dozen turns after horsemen.
-horses are more plentiful than iron on the maps
-horsemen have more strength 12 vs. 11
-horsemen have more move points 4 vs 2
-horsemen can move after attack, swordsmen can't
-horsemen can take a city and retreat out - important for those scenarios where the ai retakes the next turn. With swordsmen, you lose the unit with the city recapture
-horsemen move so much faster, they can get to and participate in many more early battles, earning XP faster than swordsmen
-horsemen can take units in open terrain and retreat out, swordsmen get stuck in the killing fields and die.
-the horse tech path gives better early benefits than the sword tech path. With horses you get pasture building for some food (and production with horses), roads for gold and circus for happy in those 3 techs. With swordsmen you get mining (which is good if you have gems, gold or silver nearby but otherwise not so useful in the early game with only a few pop points), and some military buildings.

On the plus side for swordsmen:
-horsemen have a designed counter with spears and pikes, swords don't
-swords get rough terrain bonuses, horsemen don't. Note that about 80-90% of standard maps are open terrain, so if you need to avoid fighting on rough terrain, you usually can.
-swords have a quicker tech path to upgrade than horsemen.


The biggest benefit to horsemen is that horsemen get out a dozen turns sooner, and can make it to their target another few turns quicker than swords, which means you'll conquer your first civ city much much earlier with horses, which will translate into more production, gold and beakers down the road. A quick start snowballs, and horses are way quicker out the gate than swordsmen.

Bottom line for me is that horsemen blow the doors off swords. They are faster to tech and produce, more consistent to have the resources for, get to battles quicker, are stronger and faster and have more survivability.

Oh, and Swordsmen do have a hard counter. It's called "horsemen".

 

[stormerne]

• If you just take down the strength, people will just take more on their city raids, and three or four will become six.
• If you clip a movement point off them, but still allow them to move after striking, it will just add a few turns to most victories and might not matter much except at the highest levels and largest maps.
• If you remove the move after striking, you remove the point of horsemen completely and that wouldn't be good for overall game balance.
• If you remove the promotions, it would make no difference to rushing as only instant heal is used.
• If you make them cost 50% more, you'd slow down the onset of a rush slightly, encourage more cheesy loan deals but not change anything substantially.
• If you bury it deeper in the tech tree, you unbalance the tree, as there's nothing in parallel with it at the moment that should be before it, and nothing after it that should be in parallel.

So... you must make the counters stronger. How?

• Spearmen already get +100% against mounted: 2x7 vs. 12 (14 for CC). Pikes get +100% to 2x10. Some argue that's enough and I agree.
• Make them weak against city walls. This is my favorite. Not just cities but only those with walls. We're not dealing with Pegasus but ordinary horses who would get a very sore nose running into a city wall. In fact, strengthen city walls anyway. +5 defence is not enough. In Civ2, city walls tripled the guardian's defence against most land-based troops! It was a different system, and I'm not asking for that, but make the strength of walls dependent on what's attacking. How about doubling wall/castle strength against mounted units?

 

[LordTC]

Coolest Idea: City walls gain the ability "This city many not be attacked by mounted units". This ability is obselete when the civilization owning the mounted unit has metallurgy. This would actually make city walls be worth building and would make horses work properly (dominating the open field but not able to take any fortified positions (think about how turtling in castles helped Europe stop the Mongols).

Give horses a big penalty on forested tiles. Or remove the ability for them to get promotions on rough terrain.

Also worth considering: Have iron appear on the map at bronze working, so that its actually possible to hook it up to get swordsmen at a reasonable pace. This actually makes some thematic sense, people knew about iron for a long time and knew it was a strong metal, but they weren't able to melt it until much later on. It makes it a little easier to hook up iron.

Consider making it so Iron Working costs the same to get to as horseback riding (both move into classical age). If you need to balance out that tech line then you can raise metal casting by a similar amount to what you decrease the early techs (although this might make bulbing a little dangerous).

Other Possibilities: Make it slightly easier to get to civil service (require animal husbandry + philosophy) instead of trapping + philosophy, so people can beeline to the counter.

 

[E66man]

Coolest Idea: City walls gain the ability "This city many not be attacked by mounted units".

Nice idea, but an extremely steep penalty might be better. Total prohibitions usually just frustrate players.

 

[Muminus]

Penalty for attacking cities.
Or walls should give cities +100% strenght vs mounted

 

[boehj]

I'm really liking some of the suggestions in this thread. For me, the main three modifications would be to slightly nerf the strength, have a penalty vs cities (or perhaps cities with walls) and make iron show up a bit earlier.

Whatever happens, *something* needs to be done. I can't bring myself to build horsemen anymore because they're so OP. They're arguably more out of whack than Maritime and that's saying a lot!

 

[Varanid]

I'll favor making iron show up earlier as the best "nerf."
Right now I almost always beeline for horse just because I usually don't have more than 2-3 cities by the time I get iron working, and I'm no more than maybe 40/60 on having it versus not anywhere near them...but I almost always have horses. And there's a pretty long stretch where iron units are the best land units; longswords are stronger than the musketmen, so it isn't really until you get rifles you get a better infantry type unit.

 

[Slowpoke]

Heh, this topic is created every week We should just sticky it

But yeah, +200% for anti-mounted, up from +100%, and horses giving only 2 resources works well enough.

 

[elthrasher]

I understand and can appreciate your statement that a rifle rush may be superior to the horse/knight track long term. But your statement that horsemen are worse than swordsmen as contemporaries is way over the top and not supported by the facts.

Heh, good analysis, but I didn't say horsemen are worse than swordsmen. I said they are ultimately the weaker choice because you can't sustain a horse rush over a an Immortal or Deity Pangaea.

I guess the point here is more of a philosophical one. Is it necessary to nerf horsemen when it's actually reasonably easy to have BC rifles in this game?

I agree with many of your points and in a straight-up comparison horses are better. Of course that ignores the upgrade path and the opportunity for a very early warrior rush. Really the biggest downside of going swords, in my view, is the scarcity of iron. Sometimes you really just can't lay your hands on any. But if you get a vein of 6 iron next to your capital, you can upgrade your 4-5 veteran warriors at 90 gold per. You can actually get these guys out and attacking a city faster than if you went for horses because you aren't going to have the gold to rush out four horsemen right away so you have to spend turns hammering them.

So the way I see it, you've got two options for the early game rush. One is more reliable, but less sustainable. They are close to equal in power. Horses give you more tactical options if you have to battle an opponent who has you beat in units - horses are much better to clean them out. Horses kind of suck in comparison to swords if there's lots of rough terrain or if rivers are in inconvenient places. And the biggie for me is that swords transition to boomsticks in around 100 turns and you get a nice period of taking cities by the dozen.

 

[Soronery]

Heh, this topic is created every week We should just sticky it

But yeah, +200% for anti-mounted.

Then 1 spear could basically take down an army of horses. This is a bad idea.

 

[futurehermit]

1) Less movement
2) City attack penalty
3) AI more likely to build spears
4) Spears get more of a bonus vs. horsemen

Imo horsemen should be for raiding and flanking not for wiping civilizations off your continent

 

[swordspider]

I don't think you should cut their movement, it is only 5 and a man can move 2. So that seems 'realistic'. What you need to do is make spearmen more dangerous or simply display iron on the map with Bronze Working or Masonry so that you can appropriately position your second city for swordsmen, which will slice up the little horsies.

 

[PawelS]

Interesting thing is that I made Iron revealed with Mining for a completely different reason: to enable building Catapults without Iron Working, and also Triremes, which require Iron in my mod (I made the Galley buildable with Pottery and resourceless).