Astaroth wrote:10 yabusame is 1500 gold, that is almost 4 culvs worth of resources. 4 culvs can annihalate countless falcs at range without being in danger, unless the opponent also has culvs. Nobody would make yabusame if they had culvs.
Yabusame have to dive in. Imagine a scenario where your opponent masses a large amount of units, say 100 pop (rest vills) of like 8 falc, skirm and goon. Yes, you will be able to kill like 3 falc with your yabusame, but then all of them get sniped. Then you still have say mass inf or cav vs falc/goon.
You also can't commit with your units to kill the skirms and guard the yabusame, because falcs have higher range, so they will destroy your whole army on the way.
but culvs dont have a rof of 1.5, thats kind of the point, you can take down five falcs in just 7 1/2 seconds with only ten... also yabusame really aren't that much more expensive than goons anyways (210 res instead of 180), and yumi are food & wood so its really not that big of a deal. Like said above, if you know someone is going artillery heavy, yabusame are not only just viable, but extremely good and arent useless like culvs afterwards, having pretty decent DPS against cav and similar range to yumi.
just saying, if someone has 100 pop, with 8 of it falcs, thats gonna leave a max of like 25 skirms and 10 goons or similar. 25 skirms = 17 damage, 0.75 against yabusame (1.5x0.5 armour) for 318 damage potential to them: yabusame have 240 hp means even if you focus fire perfectly with the skirms you can kill 1.5 yabusame max, every three seconds, while you've lost 1000 res of falcs in the time it takes a skirm to reload. On paper and in practice, yabusame are NUTS against an artillery heavy army, which is why they are not only viable, but desirable.