When a cannonball lands on you, it's horrible. But when it's both the cannonball landing on you and *all* of your knive-sword-things going into your chest all at once, it's _horrendous._
@@zach202359 It's kind of a quantum thing, they're both knives and swords until you're getting stabbed or cut, then suddenly it resolves into one or the other.
Ok so dev here, let's talk about Mamelukes a bit as the story is a bit deeper and convoluted. Let's set the stage: in AoC, camels have 0 camel armor and 11 cavalry armor. This means that Mamelukes would take the full anti camel bonus, and also anti cavalry damage, reduced by 11. Making them very vulnerable to halbs or heavy camels, who do significant damage against both armor classes. In DE it was considered silly for Mamelukes to have this double armor, as they were now too weak to halbs, and the decision was made to make them less weak to only spear line specifically. It was then decided to remove their cavalry armor altogether, and create the Mameluke armor class. Except for halbs, every unit that would be able to deal anti cav bonus vs Mamelukes gained the appropriate bonus against that new armor. Heavy Camels have +18 vs cav, so they would deal 18-11=7 bonus to Mamelukes through that armor, so they received a +7 bonus vs Mamelukes to not alter that matchup. You will notice in the video that except for the spear line, the value of bonus damage vs Mamelukes is the value of bonus vs cavalry minus 11. Which leads us to elite Mamelukes. They have +12 vs cavalry, which in the old day would mean 12-11=1 bonus vs Mamelukes. Hence their now +1 bonus vs themselves. It's a big fun mess, but once you dig into it you learn a lot about the making and evolution of the game. If you think about it, Mamelukes started with cavalry and infantry armors. They then lost infantry but gained archer and ship armors. Then they lost the ship armor and gained camel armor. Then they lost cavalry and gained Mameluke armor. And then finally they lost archer armor, in such a rollercoaster of a ride.
Alright but when you guys made DE wasn't it simpler just giving them the cavalry Armor class instead kinda like how throwing axeman have infantry Armor as they both are melee units
What Im much more concerned with is how did you came up with the concept of every unit having 1000 armor of all types instead of simple bonuses. This seems ridiculously contrived.
@@doctordeath9336 Have you ever seen a full army of these units, and what they can do? I saw a LAN game years ago when one of my friends held off three armies with 40 mamalukes, Pikemen and a handful of monks.
Fun fact: Both Jaguar Warrior and Hand Cannoneer have 10 bonus damage against infantry. As Condottieri are infantry anti gunpowder units and aren't supposed to receive the additional damage from Hand Cannoneer, they have 10 infantry armor. But as the Jaguar Warrior still should do its 10 extra damage (no gun powder inside their clubs), they introduced the "Condottiero armor class", for which the Jaguar Warrior does 10 extra damage against.
All non gunpowder that has bonus against infantries have identical dmg bonus to condotieri armor, kinda confusing but when you think about them, it would make sense
Funfact: The Ninja-Bonus damage Easter egg was actually reused for AoE3, where Hero units are a regular sight. They have a 10x multiplier against them as well as all mercenary units.
I dont believe this is the case, ninjas were mostly likely added with The Forgotten, came later than aoe3, as they were not in aoc. I believe these were based of from those in aoe3 instead
I understand the concept of bonus damage is essential to game balance, but the fact that each unit always has different kinds of damage bonus against other units is really intimidating to new players to learn the game.
I understand AOE3 is not most people's favourite, but it did a good job at using multipliers instead of additions, and listing them all whenever you select a unit. Like, in AOE 2, spears have +15, pikes +22 and hallberds + 32, but in AOE3, all pikemen line units alwys have a X8 bonus against cav and only their base attack changes with upgrades, but the bonuses appear to keep up since they're listed as multipliers.
I played around 5 years before discover bonus damage. When you play against AI because internet wasn't a common thing... I only beleived that pikeman have bonus damage and that's all because when you look at stat you have no clue that bonus damage exist. I have friends who make excel who took a long time to make to know if in 1vs1 a fight worth it between two units. You measure the cost of each unit, how many hp remain.
I mean, bonus damage really isn't important to the function of the game, you just have to know that the game has a counter system. My dad has played the game since launch and only knows how the rock paper scissors works, not why it works. And that has served him well enough to love the game for over 2 decades at this point
I absolutely love that so many awkward bonus damages comes from just the fact that the game is really old and old programming comes with weird sloppy quirks and balance decisions. It really gives the game quite a charm that you don't find in more modern rts games like Starcraft 2
It’s not strictly “old programming”, it’s just that you solve for the constraints you have at the time, and you can’t always predict what kind of flexibility a system might need to have in the future. There was plenty of fantastic code written 20 years ago and plenty of garbage code written 20 years ago, and I would hazard a guess that the ratio of fantastic to garbage has either held steady or grown with the amount of people pouring into the tech scene in the past couple decades. I get your point but just want to assure you that the Forgotten Empires devs are most likely adding the same appropriately sized amount of garbage to the Aoe2 code base as any other dev team that has worked on it. It’s just in the nature of software dev, you write something perfect given one set of conditions and then two years later you’re working at a different company and someone else gets asked to make a “simple change” that will violate one of the assumptions you made. Then adding a button turns into a 4-week project with multiple meetings.
Starcraft 2 does have its own programming quirks though. If I remember correctly, one of the campaign missions (A Sinister Turn) is programmed in a completely different way to all of the other missions - instead of being built in the map editor editor, it's constructed pretty much directly in the game's code.
@@ArawnOfAnnwn pretty sure it was the earliest made mission in the game although it might not be the first mission that Blizzes had made on the Galaxy engine, it sure is the only one left standing to this day Kinda like Constantinople
Every time there's talk about bonus damages in this game I wish we had an option to show "detailed stats" or something that showed all the numbers of the selected unit. Or alternatively show it the same way AoE3 does it with a little symbol for the appropriate unit with the amount of bonus damage your selected unit deals to it next to its base attack.
I can't be entirely convinced that the Winged Hussars' anti-gunpowder bonus damage ISN'T just because some dev on the team is a Sabaton fan and wanted to reference the lyric "Janissaries, are you ready to die?" in the song "Winged Hussars."
@@pwn3dname Aye, but it's not like the Ottoman Turks had a specific association to gunpowder (unless they do, and I just don't know my history). If anything, if it was based purely on history, then you'd think it'd be a straight anti-siege bonus (they beat the *siege* of Vienna, after all).
the Ottoman Turks did have a specific association to gunpowder, though, which is why they have gunpowder-related bonuses in nearly every RTS they appear in. While they didn't invent it, they were enthusiastic early adopters and the innovations they made with gunpowder enabled them to become the first "gunpowder empire". It's commonly thought that they held an edge in gunpowder tactics up and until the Siege of Vienna, when European gunpowder and metallurgy finally started to catch up with them.
Few things I noticed about Rams: Teutons Iron clad tech protects against Chu Ko Nu and Kipchak. Organ guns get +1 against rams, but it actually does nothing because 1 is the minimum damage anyway (and the extra shots always deal 2 like the video said).
> Organ guns get +1 against rams, but it actually does nothing because 1 is the minimum damage anyway packed trebuchets 8 pierce armor and 0 ram armor, so it technically helps there.
Dont forget Siege Elephants. They can upgrade their melee armor through the blacksmith, making the ChuKoNu and Kipchak less effective or useless altogether
A fun side effect of SotL's awesome videos is that people like me who don't even play the game and just like watching it amass a butt load of information - admittedly mostly trivial but sometimes very useful - with which we can then surprise or help out even professional players during their stream for example.
That Ninja one seems to have been carried over to AOE 3 with extra damage against leaders and such. Maybe they wanted to do something in AOE 2 with that but chose otherwise.
Pretty sure they saw the aoe3 concept of anti hero units and liked it for some weird things. For those who dont know in AOE 3 your explorer is a hero and usually has rather Mir damage compared even to the military units you get in the first available age but a LOT of hp, so there's this niche units like spies, ninjas and mercenaries that are costly take usually more population per unit and aren't good vs other armies despite being individually strong but if a specific enemy hero is being a pest you use them to assasinate them
@@kR-qj7rw To be more specific, mercenaries are potentially very powerful in-the-right-circumstance but very expensive and pop-inefficient units. Spies + ninjas counter both them and hero units. This is useful against non-European civs that have very powerful hero units and European civs that have strong mercenary options (like the Italians or the Swedes)
about elite mamelukes. Essentially, at one point, they changed the +11 cavalry armor class of mamelukes to their own, unique armor class, presumably because that makes balancing them easier. Iirc it was done to specifically reduce damage, halberdiers do to them, by a bit, without affecting anything else. Various units then got bonus damage against the mameluke armor class so that they do the same amount of damage that they did before. One of these units is .... the elite mameluke, which does 12 bonus damage against cavalry. 12 - 11 = 1, and as such, they got +1 bonus damage against the mameluke class so their total damage remains the same. Same applies to cannon galleons (15-11=4) random fun fact about sheep: researching sappers greatly increases villager damage against both (crucially killing cows in one hit instead of two)
In Brazil, there's a specific name that is given to unorthodox solutions, like the most presented in this video, which is Gambiarra. Giving the vils extra damage against sheep by their lack of fortifications defense works, but it is a Gambiarra in the game codes.
I spent my entire teen years playing the trial version and conquerors, and my adult life playing mods that later became official expansions But more than half of what i know about the game i learned them thanks to you Not only it's great to have a channel covering your favourite game, but also teaching about it
So in summary: - camels are weak against sheep - Mamelukes are in a (Armor) class of their own - Ninjas are good at murdering Royals, but also way to sneak to even appear in your build options
So there was a fun moment when Leitis was introduced in The Last Khan expansion (DE), every units have 0 Leitis armor in addition to all armor they had before, Leitis doesn't interract with melee armor like other melee units by default, they only have Leitis attack, this is the secret of why Leitis attack would pierce armor. Funny interraction happened with Ram, because Leitis didn't interract with melee armor, they do not benefits from ram's negative melee armor, thus making them deal less dmg than a lot other melee units. They seems to figure out how to make unit attacks ignore armor now as they remove Leitis ability to ignore siege units armors but this in return made them do extra damage to Ram like all other melee units. Dynasty of India basically seal the armor usage, since they figured out how to give unit attacks that ignores armor, they can go ham with Dravidian's Wootz Steel that affects multiple units.
It's crazy to me that this video and subsequent Dev response underneath it all came from me (creator of the at 0:09 mentioned reddit post) just nerding into the techtree (cause I like playing memelukes) and telling my friend who subsequently asked SoTL on Patreon :D
Interestingly enough, in Age 3, ninjas have that same bonus against hero/explorer units, and are regular tavern/saloon units, meaning there’s a chance you can make them from said buildings or their equivalents on every map, get them through home city shipments on some civs, or just train them from the embassy as Japanese if you choose isolationism.
I wonder if the winged hussar bonus vs gunpowder was a result of polish and bohemians being tested side-by-side, and the devs deciding that polish needed something extra against those darn houfnice
the devs back then (and now, as they continue with the old style code) really had some interesting solutions. For example for Age 2 DE I asked why seperate AIs cant have seperate difficulty- thats because you only set the world difficulty in the game, which affects any AI, including wolves etc. also some campaign spawns depend on difficulty of the world.... Back in the day this was the most efficient to implement, and seperate difficulty per AI was not common anyways.
The winged hussars' bonus against gunpowder units is based on the second Ottoman siege of Vienna, where in the year 1683, an army from Venice, Bavaria, Saxony, Franconia, Swabia, Baden, upper Hessia and Poland, under command of the Polish king, defeated the Ottomans. After 12 hours of fighting, the Polish king ordered a cavalry charge, and the entire Christian force as well as the defenders of Vienna went on the offensive and routed the Ottomans. The Ottomans made heavy use of gunpowder in gerneral, and also in this siege, in canons, arquebuses, and in mines they dug under the city walls. They were in fact just about to set off the charges. The defenders of Vienna also dug tunnels to stop the tunnels of the Ottomans, which led to nasty fighting underground. Sabaton also made a song about it...
winged hussars bonus against gun powder is prob a nod to the moment when they were in the spotlight: the battle of Vienna. 18,000 Polish Winged Hussars won a spectacular victory against the Ottoman army of Musketeers two months into a siege. Completely overrunning the much larger force routing them and saving the capitol of Austria from capture. Largest cavlery charge in history.
My theory of why land units are strong against ships is that you could say your units are “boarding the ship and killing its crew” while its close to land. Basically a ship with no crew is useless. So ships basically take bonus damage from land units. As for gun powder versus rams, gun powder weapons were very well known for blowing through armor quite effectively.
As it stands, looking at the info-box of a unit or an upgrade mid-game to gauge if it's appropriate against an enemy unit type or if it's a good investment, is as good as useless.
As a Data Analyst myself and do a lot of configurations in my company system, I can totally understand the whole-mess but still works sweetly like this 🤣🤣🤣
This again brings to mind the question of how useful the ingame unit stats for attack, armor etc. really are. Considering the information represented in the video, I'm guessing those stats can straight up be called *misleading* in more than half of the fights that units perform in.
Not really. Code-wise : You can def make a far more elegant system nowadays where the unit that's getting damaged iterates through all the armor types it has, finds the appropriate damages in the list of damage types of the attack and then calculates damage. But judging from the "by default armor is 1000" I think the armor and damage types are held in a static array, so you can't really easily deal with stuff have a different amin of armor types, and since they probably wanted the ram to take +3 damage from literally anything melee, having the "I don't take this bonus damage" be a negative value would break that. Design-wise: It's more interesting, and it allows to far more easily apply concepts like "Spearman are effective against horses" which is a bit of a trope (actually how much of it is due to age of empires?) without it also buffing their hability against other units like the militia line. Other stuff you could toy with make spear good against horse, bad against swordsman is stuff like attack speed, but then you basically have to balance the spear line individually against every single uniting the game Multipliers are honestly not really that great cause they're inflexible with this, it's good for something like an RPG where you are either going to do only 1 damage type to stuff, or do a lot of different damage types, but with the types describing more aspects of a enemy rather than describing a unit itself (ie. "fire damage" instead of "anti archer damage" ) Having a unit do less damage to the wrong type isn't great for learning the game, it's easier to notice when your everything suddenly dies fast that there's something extra happening, instead of noticing your everything is not dying as much, starcraft 1 had that and I basically never noticed it until I randomly payed attention to the a Terran marine's hp whilst being attacked by a terran siege tank. A marine has 40 hp, tank deals 40 dmg, but marine took 20; you'll normally have dozens of things attacking eachother and need to be aware of their position, you don't pay attention to the HP of stuff, but rather how fast your and their stuff are dying (subtle but a massive difference)
The mameluke IS unique in having damage bonus against itself, because it's the sole unit in the entire game with the Mameluke armor class, therefore, it's the sole unit in the entire game that has a bonus against an armor class that only it has, the only unit with bonus damage SPECIFICALLY targeted at itself.
I'd argue that Samurai would count. As a unique unit. With a unique attack modifier that targets unique units specifically. Such as itself. Admittedly there are more targets than just the Mameluke itself. But it's unique in it's unique bonus against unique units uniquely!
@@glenmcgillivray4707 Samurai target all unique units. They have an attack bonus against themselves the same way Skirms have an attack bonus against themselves, it's not really unique at all. Memelukes target Memelukes specifically, which is unique among all units in the game.
@@bananaslamma35 na. Because the attack bonus against unique units is unique. Meanwhile Rams are another unit with a unique armor class and take bonus damage from themselves.
I wish this game was a little more simple regarding armor types and bonus damage. Hidden stats is never a good thing IMO. They could at least show it in game somewhere.
WC3: We have a few armor and damage classes that have relations with each other. Pretty complicated, huh? AoE2: If you haven't gone to the Spirit of Law University for advanced AoE math you are doomed to even understand sheeps.
I was once fiddling with the scenario editor and I found out that siege had an incredible amount of bonus damage versus wild animals such as boars and wolves
I discovered this in the aztec campaign. I used a ram to bust the gate to that temple that gives your jaguar warriors 10x hp. Inside there is Ornlu the wolf (or is it son of ornlu?). I figured whelp, my ram's now dead, might as well get a couple hits in to lower him to 447 health. Next thing I know, he's dead. Huh.
Infantry armor on mamlukes that explians why I had trouble with french hand cannoneers is saladin #6. But that ranged 10+4 attack on mamlukes with 130 hp and +3/+4 armor makes them too good vs anything thrown at them. Remeber that they can defend themselves against camels who while fighting the first row of mamlukes, mamlukes behind will still be throwing swords at camels, cataphracts and other troubling units threatening to counter mamlukes. Mamlukes have 1 single unit in the whole game that is hard counter: The ELITE teutonic knight. the castle age teutonic knight still loses to even the regular mamluke since he does not have the needed melee armor to reduce mamluke damage to 1 and taking more than 1 damage is enough to take them out. If you are able to hit and run the slow teutonic knights, you can handle the elite ones and hit and run all the way to your castles and towers or long enough until you bring archers to deal with them.
I can only figure that the steppe lancer has +0 vs siege because of a mistake. I guess the originally wanted to give it a bonus against siege like the Magyar Hussar, which is also a lancer.
A customized ninja unit would be a cool unit to have in T90 community regicide games where a monument in the middle would give you resources and the option to produce these ninjas.
would be interesting to habe both ninja and hassasin in the game as very specialized fast infantry with somewhat low base damage and high bonus damage and a long vision radius, kinda like a very specialized scout infantry unit
Land units attack bonus vs ships is weird but its necessary information ive been looking for for a long time. Nobody has any videos on the relation between ships vs land units on a map like water nomad. To know that halberdier are doing significant bonus damage vs ships is vital info
keep in mind that fire ships have quite a bit of ship armor though so not all units that do bonus damage against ships actually do bonus damage to fire ships
Playing against stupid AIs on the continental map taught me about the halb bonus. Their galleons were always sitting in the shallows asking to be stabbed.
@@IschmarVI See this is exactly why we need someone to do a breakdown video of all of these relationships! It's actually weird to me that SOTL hasn't done one because he's clearly looking for things to make content about and I've been blowing up his videos with this suggestion for months
Fighting ships with land units on water nomad isn't a great idea in most cases. Ships outspeed infantry and archers and have better stats than land units in general. You've got to fight ships with ships in most cases. Towers and castles can work too, depending on the situation.
@@teddyhaines6613 I appreciate the succinct answer but we all know it's more complicated than that. In this game we know there are a thousand questions you can ask just based on the brief scenarios you offered. The real questions we need answered are along the lines of, If I have 15 knights and my opponent has 15 galleons on water nomad, do I engage? What if he has 30 archers and I have 15 fire ships? On and on endlessly, I'm just saying there's plenty of information there that would be useful to the community and we need a genius like SOTL to break down all the variables. Frankly I don't think there's enough info out there on water meta as it is, and this specific area seems very unexplored
A king sniping unit with bonus damage on Regicide mode would be fun. So instead of a group of cav archers, just one ninja garrisoned in your team mates castle is enough to backstab them.
OH YES! Im one of the firsts to be here! Spirit I love your videos and whenever one drops it instantly makes my day, I wish there were more of you so we could have a Spirit of the Law for every game (or more SOTL AoE2 videos!), keep up the good work! PS: Please make updated videos on the civ revieeews, its one of my favorite series!
It's nice to watch your videos again What happened to the iconic intro? It's the first thing that comes to mind when it comes to your channel Good wishes
Soldiers beats calvary, calvary beats archers, archers beats soldiers... for you see, age of empires is a rock paper scissors gam... SOTL: *OBJECTION!!*
I know it is a "meme" to say a bug is actually a feature, but some developers have observed a phenomenon where a bug does become a feature by a number of means. Sometimes, they decide what was originally a bug is actually a good thing, so they leave it alone. Other times, and more often, they just don't identify a bug is a bug until so much time has passed that no one can recognize it as a bug because they have forgotten what the code was supposed to look like. I suspect a number of the strange AOE franchise bonus damage numbers are examples of the latter: someone wrote the wrong code long ago, such as +4 damage to Mamelukes by Cannon galleons, but it proved so inconsequential to gameplay that it just never got changed, and then it was forgotten that the original idea was for some other unit to have that +4 damage or something like that.
Wonderful. Next time I play an island map I'll be sure to make plenty of spears to fight the camel ships before they can rain anti mamaluke cannonballs onto my army that is presently attacking itself.
Winged Hussars have +4 damage to gunpowder? Cannonballs are coming down from the sky ♫ Janissaries are you ready to die? ♫ Seriously I wouldn't be surprised if it was because of the Winged Hussars song...
