The Organ Gun changes explained (AoE2 April patch) 

So basically they went from hard countering huskarls to being hard countered by huskarls

someone should make an organ gun visual mod that makes it shoot organs

It's so strange that they tightened the dispersion cone so much. I think if they really want to make it a shotgun unit, they should really increase the damage each shot does and widen the dispersion cone more so it's actually good against groups of units rather than sniping individual units with a focused blast

They should add some extra damage for each bullet but drastically increase the dispersion, far more than it was before.

Turning the Organ Gun into an AoE wide-spread shotgun makes a lot of sense to set them apart. It's what they look like they should be as a unit in the first place! EDIT: Welp, after the tests, I guess it still isn't that. :U

I love your effort in giving a unique name to all the groups of units.

The first thing I thought when I saw this change in the Patch Notes was that it'd make for a great SotL video.

The recoil before firing is actually (somewhat) historically accurate. The black powder they used back then was much less efficient than modern gunpowder so you would feel the recoil before the bullet left the barrel. With muskets and the like, people would actually aim below their target because the recoil would push the barrel upward before the bullet left.

id consider this a major nerf. getting slightly better against things they were already good at does not make up for half of the counters becoming hard counters. now 1 mangonel will immediately completely shut down any castle age aggression. a chain is as strong as its weakest link. easy to counter -> bad unit.

I'd be interested to see a modded version demonstrating higher damage (maybe 10)? With a much higher dispersion

Rest in peace for all the brave men who died from those guns so that you could bring us this data!

Hi SOTL I really like the new way you compare units side by side. In general, well done with showing and explaining what’s going on. I look forward for more april patch content and Civs overviews.

IMO, for the intended purpose, a mix between pre-patch and post-patch would have made more sense: Damage and dispersion cone of the pre-patched version (or maybe a little less damage if it's too much), 0% accuracy and all bullets dealing the same damage (and all of them being impacted by pierce armor) as with the post-patch version.

I say its an overall nerf, the small advantage vs low armor trash doesnt make up for all the downsides. Also there are plenty of options to deal with those if necessary

@SpiritOfTheLaw You showed a none-elite Organ Gun in blue on the top of the screen when they shooting the paladins at 7:55 . But i am sure You did the test with the elite version like you are telling us in this part :)

I noticed the odd firing animation early on in the video and you them calling it out was perfect

A thing that might be cool for a follow up video is to look at is the Napoleonic/naval warfare concept of "Crossing the T" with organ guns, where a horizontal oriented group of units firing at a vertically oriented group of units is much more effective. Scorpions for example would do significantly better in that regard- hitting 10 units with 1 projectile vs 3 with the 3 rows of 10. I am not sure if it extends to organ guns. Seems like many of the strays are passing through, theoretically they would have less room to miss when crossing the T, but it's possible they might have even more room to miss. Anyway, might be a fun thing to look at, not clear which way is better without testing.

The change is a MASSIVE NERF to Organ Guns because of their role in Castle-age pressure-play vs buildings and ability to stymie their intended cavalry counters via massed slugging; that single big pellet was vital to their viability, and now that it's gone so too is their viability as a unit pretty much everywhere but vs massed infantry (which itself is a relative rarity).

I know you made an updated best civilizations video only about a month ago, but I would absolutely love another one soon because of this huge update!

By far my favourite RU-vidr! You have come such a long way and I really love you analysing the game! Fantastic! 😊

such a wonderfully explained video! thanks!! :)

Thank you for the new video!

Videos like this are what brought me back to Age of Empires

Love your content. Wouldn't it be better to have more stark color comparisons? Instead of cyan and blue, cyan and red or something similar? Those two colors can be hard to spot

That little announcement at the end could have been great (still can!) as a short!

I've been waiting for the orjan gun video!

Interesting change overall, though in my opinion they should have maybe made the overall damage a bit lower and had it unaffected by pierce armor since a big difference between crossbows and early fire arms isn't the "damage" so to speak as much as that fire arms could pierce even heavy armor

it might be good to see a comparison also at maximum range, in your video i saw many secondary bullet being overshot so they did't reach any target. and also I believe that if they are supposed to work as a complementary unit as you said, they are going to work at maximum range most of the times. Also the cone dispersion will be shown more effectively.

I hope the devs address the now small cone of fire, they could add a bit more dmg to the shots if the cone of fire was a bit larger. On small groups of enemy units "a lot more" shots would be missing the target and on larger groups of enemies they would act like the shotgun they already look like.

They can keep the lowered att stat and still adding the 2 ignored armor damage, make them actually like an infantry counter like Hand Cannoneer but better

oh ya big question i wanted answered ty SOTL

The captions call it the "Oregon gun" a few times which is great

In Miunute 4:50 u speak of Recoil before fiering .. i would say to move they have to lift the gun up.. so the recoil u see is the end of the gun pushed to the ground so it dont move during the shot :)

Love your vids SOTL

I think they should increase the number of projectiles. Test that out on a closed beta/test patch and see how it goes. Early firearms usually tore through light armor, and only heavy metal plate stopped it consistently. Perhaps add a slight light bleed dot effect for anything hit by multiple of the same attack (like each projectile does a small add to a counter, with a quick decay time so if 2 projectiles hit the same thing, its likely to proc). It'd make massing your guns more proper for mowing down a line. Alternatively, make the elite upgrade double the spread and projectiles to allow it to be a massive crowd controller when grouped up.

I actually like the idea of each projectile now doing equal damage each as it now puts a bigger focus on their spread shot capability as an organ gun should be doing, causing mass damage to all units rather then just doing full damage to one and only 1 or 2 damage to everyone else. But perhaps they should do more work on it.

Rome dlc release date in roman numbers is a great touch ! Love the details

Yes! Funky outro music is back!

Considering that the Organ Gun was already performing poorly against high pierce armor units, but was used in castle mainly against archers and infantry, I would call this patch an adjustment ; it got a bit better in it's specialty, and much worse in the roles where you shouldnt be using them in the first place. But yeah I would definitely have rather seen a slightly wider cone, and projectiles that deal 3 or 4 damage with the elite upgrade than a straight up Organ Gun SSSniper I'd say it's still an interesting adjustment to the Organ Gun, and I wonder if they'll patch it again in the next few patches if they see the feedback from the community

No wonder Sotl has so many organic views. He goes straight to the guts of the subject and eviscerates it.

A mass of Organ Guns with standing your ground with Bombard Cannons alongside to deal with buildings in the Portuguese Campaign in Age of Empires 2 DE were a lot of fun to use if you ask me. :3

It could be interesting that they continue on the new version but greatly increase the spread to like a 90° cone and add more projectiles. The unit would never hit at max range but would instantly melt anything that comes melee.

porcupine, quiver and tickle are great, i was just missing the cavalcade

4:40 Taking a wild guess is that due to the staggered formation, the Organs may not overkill as much as they do when they're all bunched together. Maybe stray bullets more often hit a different target, doing full damage as opposed to hitting a 1-HP pre-damaged targets and losing effectiveness.

Also of note, Portuguese tech tree is almost as diverse as Chinese. They just get gunpowder units in exchange for no HCA and slower infantry (which is fine since organ guns can force engagement with pikes).

I'd be interested in seeing how they'd fair if their cone was widened and their damage was increased to 8~9 non-elite, and 10~11 elite. I'm fine with them being a back-line/support unit (a Scorpion alternative, basically), but I don't think they're fully living up to the "good vs. tightly-packed groups" design.

As for the animations, smoke before recoil is fine especially for flintlock or matchlock based weapons as the powder in the pan burns for a couple fractions of a second before the shot goes off

So basically, Organ Guns went from being their own, organic (HEH) unit to "Worse Hand Cannoneers, but one age earlier". I guess in a way, it works at reducing their Castle Age powerspike (like the Conquistador changes!)

Was there a graph for the castle age organ gun which did not make the video? Appreciate the Imp graph.

Also, militia line is getting gambesons... which is another nerf to the organ gun which is now exclusively good against spear line... maybe?

4:51 talking about animations, a cleanup could be done to samurais so they dont draw their sword every half a second for no reason

Shooting Samurais with an gun like that kinda reminds me The Last Samurai Movie

increasing the dispersion with the new model of each bullet being relevant is only going to mean that the organ gun can't kill anything. The only way they are gonna be able to make it a real anti group unit is to give it some splash or pierce through damage. Obviously those would be quite frightening to implement, but a bit of pierce through seems like you could make it work with a bit of wiggle room

Well, this defeats the idea of them being gunpowder units. The new mechanics look almost like a siege engine launching multiple arrows, instead of a gunpowder unit. Normally, this should work like 7 hand cannoneer guns bunched together, so it's strange that they work more like arrows than bullets. They should have much higher individual damage, and pay for that by having a wider spread, and maybe slower reload.

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lol a tickle of skirmishers got a chuckle out of me for sure

In the April patch collision size of fishing ships and trade cogs was reduced. Does this mean they are now more efficient than before? And if so, how much?

I wonder what the logic behind organ guns being more effective against staggered formation is. Maybe there is a cap to the number of shots a unit can take and being in such a tight cluster makes it easier for some of the shots to be wasted. Though I'm not sure why it would work that way. What could make spreading units out make organ guns actually deal more damage from the full randomness and tighter spread?

Maybe they'll tweak it some more before the patch goes thru to better get their vision

I'm curious how you would seek to adjust the organ gun. I don't like the result here much but I'd be interesting in some edits like: increase spread, change damage to 12-(tile range), perhaps remove the minimum range piece.

Isn't there an effect where 'missed' projectiles are blocked by object height? Like with fire ships. Is that going to effect organ guns?

How did the following hotfix change things from this video? Did it make them better or worse?

I'm thinking even more dispersion and several more projectiles. That would also make it less useless against cavalry close up, which I think an expensive gold unit should not be useless against.

A lot of Infantry will be pretty solid versus Organ Gun too, Thanks to that new Tech.

I see what staggered was doing. Most misses were overshoot, the extra damage versus staggered was the bullet drop allowing them to still hit when overshooting.

Dosen't recoil happen when the shot is fired and not when the shot leaves the barrel? So it would make sens for the recoil animation to be one or two frames before the one of the projectiles leaving the barrel

Hey spirit, are you planning on picking up the new Chaos Dwarf dlc for total warhammer?

Does anyone know when this April patch is getting released?

This is going to make playing Arena so much better

I'd have called it a Hedge of Pikemen but porcupine works well also tbh

Wow, I never knew a group of pikemen was called a "porcupine". You learn something new every day.

Could you do a follow-up to show how the Organ Gun performs with other units in a formation? I'm curious to see if this is meant to accompany a shift in the Portuguese playstyle or if the comments all going "BIG NERF BAD WAH WAH" are right in their declaration.

in the 10x team bonus mod units are usually unbreakable tanks and fights take long. this change however... is scary. from 56 base dmg (+8 from other projectiles) the elite organ gun now shoots up to a crazy 16x27 dmg - still nothing against high pierce specialists (huskarls, malian infantry, etc) but incredibly strong against anything else. let's say there is a building with 12 pierce armor. elite organ gun then still has a dmg potential of 16x16 = 256 per hit.

The Arambai has a pretty nice spray effect. If they want to have something similar for the organ gun, why haven't the devs used similar unit stats in regards to accuracy and so on as the arambai have it.

I'm seriously curious how they perform compared again resource equivalent scorpions. That's their closest alternative, I think?

To me, it seems that the Organ guns seems to be an ideal unit to deal with micro-ranged units, archers and such moving around shooting, since their shots disperses a bit and can possibly hit one or multiple targets with low armor

How about splash damage for the main projectile?

Nice 😍

Maybe the missing damage against buildings is due to some of the projectiles going in through one open window and out through another!

If they wanted these to be effective against groups, why not instead give them a tiny bit of splash?

To make a perfect comparison normally you should repeat all the tests of this video. Once firing at max range and once firing at min range. (But i foresee that the results will be pretty close here. It would differ more if they changed only the spread radius or only the accuracy.)

Personally I'm a big fan of this change so far although I haven't had a good test of it yet. I do think they should maybe have kept the dispersion a bit wider. But I'm happy with the change of the organ gun.

They should increase the spread and give it the ability to ignore some piercing armor (like, 2 or 3 armor piercing) to make it feel more like a "shotgun" while not increasing its maximum damage, just min damage and making it more useful against high pierce armor units while not changing its effectiveness vs low pierce armor

They should have the town announcer from HBO's Rome series announce the Rome DLC.

I had never played AoE before but I still watch this guy for some strange reason...

Just a small tip for these comparison videos: use more contrasting colors for them, not sure how those interact for people with visual difficulties but I'd guess cyan and blue can be commonly mistaken for one another

While organ guns have always had more parallels to the scorpion both in stats and projectile, the AOE/group effect thing is really in the realm of mangonels. Historically, organ guns (or more commonly known as Ribauldequins, and the first known gun was used by King Edward III of England during the Hundred Year's War, according to wiki) had much smaller caliber bullets than single shot cannons. They typically had 8-12 barrels. I think the devs are going in the right direction. I say give them 8 projectiles, which will help achieve the spread effect, and give them an "attack direction" button. Since the shot isn't being arced like mangonels the organ guns can't shoot at a specific target on the ground, but they can shoot in a straight line. Probably would need an attack nerf to compensate for the projectile increase. With that we would have the first unique mangonel type unit, which sacrifices individual punching power and finesse in target ground to a more mass scaling and sustained power unit that also doesn't do friendly fire, is quite a bit cheaper, and a bit more survivable. Edit: Another way to achieve the AOE damage would be to give the organ projectiles splash damage while keeping the old stats. Visually it would be an organ gun, but functionally it's like a bombard cannon firing cannisters of grapeshot. I'm surprised the devs didn't do that, seems a lot simpler than monkeying around with accuracy and projectile dispersion.

Ok Thanks ! When this patch will be come ?

good thing about the change: Mangos now counter then reliably. previously ORgan Guns were Jannisaries that need a redemption upgrade.

On the better accuracy despite 0% accuracy. Doesn’t this mean they can’t fire over walls anymore? Like fire ships? Plus you can keep skirms in front taking very little damage and xbows or whatever safe behind?

My thoughts seeing this: 1: I like having higher damage side projectiles and lower main projectile but it's maybe too much main projectile should go up 2-3 dmg or something, 7 is drastic. 2: 0% change is good too, but cone is definitely too narrow. 3: oh no that animation, good catch, they should fix that. They should have higher cost and much longer creation time tbh if they are too stronk and need nerf. Slower movement even, could be good, they would be more like siege you make from castle

Hey Spirit, I know you're probably busy with the new patch stuff, but I have a weird specific question: what's the villager ratio you need on wood to support x number of farms?

The organ gun should be like Chu ko nu(which is also and effective crowd control unit), the barrels don't shoot at the same time, it shots in chain. first shot hit full damage and the others 4 do 2 damage hitting the same target with some spread with tiny splash damage.

Maybe they should give it 2 extra damage against infantry and archers for all projectiles, possibly reducing it's normal damage by 1 again. As well as slightly increase the spread. I think it would make it work better for what it is intended.

I think the devs should significantly increase the number of projectiles as well as the angle of the dispersion cone. They would still suck against anything with high pierce armor, but at least they'd do what you'd expect them to do against lightly armored targets.

At 8:15, The left side shows Elite OG, the right the new non-elite version. Is that intended? Or was it tested with the same game version and editor shennanigans?

I think the bunching up causes more stray bullet hits instead of all the bullets hitting the main target but since you deal reduced damage to targets other than your primary one it is actually worse for you to get stray hits instead of regular hits.

I'm unsure as to how the new organ gun is not just a weaker Scorpion? They play the same role at the same range, except Scorpions with their higher attack don't get wrecked by pierce armor as much.. right?

Maybe they should add some bonus damage versus Skirms for the new Organ Guns so they can actually hurt them.

I think they should make the organ gun shots immune to armor but decrease there damage even more to 5 Also they should increase spread by a lot after above said change. Could make 4 damage non elite.