is the 95 unit limit on unit selection the reason that artillery is so dominant now?

[Squamiger]

Does anyone else feel like artillery is just extremely powerful in DE these days compared to EP or even earlier DE? It's not like artillery has been buffed at all, but is it maybe the fact that you can select 95 units now --> you can dragbox your whole army to cover artillery from virtually any position on the map --> suiciding cav to kill artillery almost never works?

I don't think I've seen a successful 5-10 cav rush to kill falconets in a long time, whereas that used to be semi-viable if you're in a pinch. But now it's just too easy to protect artillery with dragbox mechanics.

Meanwhile I feel like I also just constantly see players recklessly market trading to get 4-5 falconets out and then having that pay off and win them the game, since artillery + heavy infantry just wrecks everything if you don't have culverins.

Of course let's not get started on gatlings being OP, I'm just talking about falconets and heavies mostly.

So has anyone else noticed that 1v1 has become Age of Artillery, and is it just because of 95 unit dragbox?

[Garja]

I don't think there is a significant correlation between the two things.
It's just that DE changes and new civs push the meta toward that direction. And most players don't try to put it to the test but rather embrace it.

[iCourt]

Artillery pack/unpack radius was increased so cannons aren't constantly dancing during fights.

Additionally, DE changed Artillery AI to have priority to attack units instead of buildings.

I would imagine those two changes give vital milliseconds to micro anti cavalry, without fear of the cannons to start firing upon a random house, or to start twerking.

[Mitoe]

I think iCourt has a good point. Artillery is much more reliable now which reduces the number of errors players make controlling them.

I think there are some other changes to the game and meta that have contributed to it. I haven't really been playing as much this year as previous years, but even towards the end of EP days artillery was becoming much more common.

There were a couple of changes in EP that made artillery a bit better. The Artillery Foundry cost was reduced from 300w to 250w, and Dragoons had their RR nerfed a bit which just makes it more costly to go in and snipe cannons.

But the real difference was the maps. The old official RE maps generally had a lot less resources than maps today, which meant you had more incentive to play aggressively. Even in games that didn't involve some kind of all in rush, you rarely wanted to go cannons because you needed the mobility to defend exposed villagers and didn't always have the resources to support such a large army, not to mention sometimes you were just missing a gold mine on your half of the map which made it much more costly to train artillery.

Now that maps are much more consistent and have more resources overall, your economy remains safe for much longer and supports a larger army; and the larger the armies get the more valuable artillery gets because it becomes easier to defend from melee units. Having more resources has also made it more worthwhile to invest into defensive structures or TCs in your base, and cannons are great at defending your main base while also requiring that the opponent make cannons in order to push.

[Squamiger]

Interesting points. The other thing I wanted to bring up is that the one direct buff to artillery was making culvs do slightly more damage to infantry and buildings. It's minuscule but I feel like lately I've seen players slow push with culvs leftover from fights, killing a unit here and there or very slowly sieging a building; its slow but it still forces people to react a little quicker than they would have to otherwise.

[callentournies]

When you can reduce games vs better opponents into a series of coin flips (art micro) you get more Elo than otherwise.

This is why it’s proliferated imo. What’s popular are strategies and unit comps in which the strength:skill ratio is maximized. DE caters to this imo.

[Narida]

Yeah what the others said except not only goons were nerfed but basically every cav unit has been nerfed at some point: nagi, cuirs, lakota, uhlan, cossack with boyars, china cav and iro goons i think too? Of the classic popular civs those are almost all the ones that really make a lot of cav. So basically cav is nerfed and mobility is less important which makes infantry dominant. Art counters infantry.

[duckzilla]

Just for the record: before TAD cav was considerably worse than afterwards, because ranged inf didn't have a malus against them. Taking this game's original release into account, cavalry has generally been buffed, even though the development appears to be invertedly U-shaped, indeed.

[Garja]

The biggest factor is still that DE meta has become more passive/boom/turtlish. On DE it is not as important to have the classic RI/goon/cav combo (superior mobility/microability) because less battles happen in the open field (where resources were to be defended). Instead,among other things, it is more important to have some sort of siege to deal damage to the opponent base (Mitoe touched on these points already).

[Hazza54321]

Well also because of the power creep of standard units making strong overall units such as artillery unaffected and sometimes the only option. I dont see 95 selection being relevant tbh, artilerry was used alot before then also.