Should you target weaker or stronger units first?

[Jaeger]

I just saw this interesting AOE2 video where they wanted to answer the questio: should you target stronger or weaker units first? In 3/4 of their examples, they found that it was better to target the weaker units (the 4th one was concocted to fail anyway). What do you guys think for various scenarions in AOE3?

In streams I often see players targetting a few snaring huss with their skirms, while there are plenty of other damage dealing units behind the huss, such as musks or goons; this always seemed a bit questionable to me.

[Sargsyan]

depends on multipliers and unit hp. for instance you'd snipe hackapels from hackapel uhlan mix of units and hussars from hussar mameluke mix of units. so the idea is to get rid of units with better dps

[harcha]

yeah the idea is always to reduce opponent dps to your army. so shooting at hussars when both players have hussar skirm armies makes a lot of sense due to hussars having a high attack and also providing snare which increases skirmisher dps. it is also often bad to shoot the units behind the snaring hussar because that might cause your skirmisher to walk into the attacking hussar

[Thrar]

I think what it comes down to is how much damage you need to deal to them to reduce their damage dealt to you by some amount.

In the skirm/huss example, let's suppose we have some amount of vet skirms facing opponent vet skirm and vet huss.
The huss effectively have 384 * 5/4 (range resist) * 4/3 (skirm penalty) = 640 effective HP against skirms and deal 2 * 36 = 72 damage per 3 seconds.
The skirms have 144 * 10/7 (range resist) = 206 effective HP against each other and deal 18 damage per 3 seconds.

To make huss melee damage (where skirms don't have resist) and skirm ranged damage comparable, we can apply the same multiplier to the huss damage, so they deal 72 * 10/7 = 103 effective damage per 3 seconds to a skirm.

Killing a huss requires dealing 640 effective damage and removes 103 effective damage per 3 seconds from the situation. In other words, under ideal (no overkill) circumstances, every 6.2 damage dealt to a huss removes 1 damage per 3 seconds.
Killing a skirm requires dealing 206 damage and removes 18 damage per 3 seconds. That means you need to deal roughly 11.4 damage to remove 1 damage per 3 seconds.

Under these ideal circumstances, killing the huss first reduces the damage you receive almost twice as quickly as killing skirms first. In practice there are of course other factors such as the huss spending time running rather than fighting, skirms engaging in melee, enemy reinforcements catching up due to snare, overkill/underkill (doing not quite enough damage), etc.
Nonetheless, because shooting huss is almost twice as efficient as shooting skirms for reducing the damage dealt by the enemy, I would conclude that in most generic situations, killing the huss first is better.

The same kind of analysis applies for the video you linked. There however the difference in damage dealt is not as large, meaning that even though AoE2 skirms deal more damage (to archers) than AoE2 archers, it's still better to kill their archers first because skirms are so much harder to kill.

[deleted_user]

Idk if aoe2 units snare, but snare is pretty big in aoe3 so if you're retreating DPSing huss is pretty important.

Of course you want to solo fire urumis and mahouts.

I guess whether to attack move vs a group of skirms or focus one jeager is the more interesting question.

[gamevideo113]

No snare in AoE2

[tedere12]

just try to have as efficient damage as possible. Units attacking the right enemy units

[harcha]

just try to have as efficient damage as possible. Units attacking the right enemy units

yes but this is misleading. as the original poster asks - what are the right enemy units to attack? the ones that will be countered harder or some others? of course this depends on the scenario, but as i said - you want to reduce enemies dps as fast as possible. this could mean different things in different scenarios - usually killing hand units while kiting (most hand units have high dps and also snare your army increasing opponents ranged unit dps), sniping artillery, using counter system to your advantage etc. when this choice is less obvious (skirm goon vs skirm goon) it is often better to prioritize his more expensive units (goons) as it will be more expensive to him and will allow your cav to be stronger in the future (but you shouldn't trade out all your skirms too).

[Hazza54321]

Yeah usually wanna get rid of the high dps units, however targeting units snaring you is a top priority as it allows the rest of the army to catch up so essentially the snaring units are the high dps units

[Garja]

You can't give a single answer. It just depends on the situation.

[jesus3]

You can't give a single answer. It just depends on the situation.

Imo "getting rid of the snare" and then "reducing dps by targeting high dps units" seems fine as a general rule of thumb though. You can't account for every single specific unit or development, they're exceptions to the rule

[Kaiserklein]

It's so situational. Sometimes you wanna get rid of the snare yeah, sometimes you wanna snipe the higher dps units, sometimes you wanna snipe anti cav cause you have a reinforcing cav batch, sometimes you just want to have each unit type focusing the type they counter...

In any case it's not really about "stronger" or "weaker"

[Kawapasaka]

z move

[chronique]

Usually you want kill the unit with the most dps/hp unit (like the hackapel and not like the mamelouk).

[Mr_Bramboy]

z move

Yeah, just play China.

[Astaroth]

Obviously it depends on the circumstances, but all other things equal (ie ignoring counters, snare etc) you want to kill units so that the enemy's overall dps decreases the fastest.

This means: killing units with high dps and comparatively low health first. Also, you generally want to kill weaker units first: if the opponent has (fictional example): 5 weak units and. 1 strong unit, whweras the strong unit has 5x the health and the attack of the weak units, then killing the weak units step by step has the big advantage of gradually reducing the amount of damage you take while killing the remaining units. If you focus on the strong unit instead, it can be at half or 10 percent hp abd still do damage meanwhile.

[P i k i l i c]

Imo it's not about weak or strong units, it's about their hp/attack ratio. Obviously if you're attacked by a Mameluke/Hackapell combo you want to kill Hackapells first. But in real situations there are many kinds of units and multipliers have to be taken into account so it's more complicated

[HUMMAN]

Dps is not the only variable. If both units have same damage/health ratio, lets say 20 damage/100 health and 100 damage/500 health it's better to kill weaker unit assuming perfect micro, but in practice probably higher health unit because of micro. Its because high hp units perform their full damage until die while low health unit's total damage is reduced as you kill them.