Uirodusios, standard scary nakeds. Pretty unimpressive fighters if you take that "frightens nearby enemy infantry" away, but with that, oh boy are they useful. |
The mere presence of one single scary unit potentially frightens the whole enemy army: how this could potentially sound not amazing? Note that this is independent of the fact that the scary unit is engaged or not, so you can just park your scaries behind your lines, push and wait for the mass rout to happen. The barbarian bonus and the high longsword lethality are also pretty neat. That's why SP noobs used to ask "Why barbarians are so strong?" and we had a million "Barbarians OP, plz nerf" threads. At first glance, barbarian factions may indeed seem incredibly strong.
But barbarian factions suck. Why?
Many barbarian tactics revolve around scaries, e.g. the "double scare" (nakeds + chariots) or even the "triple scare" (nakeds + chariots + druids, much rarer because you're left with little else to actually do the fighting). If you take all factions as streamlined as possible, without all the special abilities (i.e. no "phalanx", "fear", "cantabrian circle" etc) you could still play Hellenistic Successors, Easterners and Rome without much hassle, but barbarians would be utterly unplayable. Why is that?
Three reasons. Barbarian "functional" units, those that synergize well with barbarian tactics, have the lowest mean armour value among all the factions in EB. Armour is one of the most, if not THE most, important asset in EB battles: armour protects regardless of the direction of the attack, armour protects against missiles, armour doesn't decrease due to fatigue. Ironclad barbarian armies are feasible, especially with the Arverni and their Arjos, but they're ludicrously expensive. You're thus forced to take a good number of light or unarmoured barbarian units. Those have high defence skill, which is good in the early game even if not omnidirectional as armour; however, prolonged fighting increases fatigue and thus decreases defence skill. The single most effective way of stalling barbarian units and waste their stamina is guard mode. A guard mode line, if correctly supported, is the leading cause of death among barbarians. And this brings us to the third point: mediocre discipline. Barbarian morale is not that bad, to be honest, but their low discipline means that, as soon as your men start dying, you're susceptible to routing and especially chainrouting.
Now put the special abilities back in the game. If you factor in units with the fear ability, barbarians can actually hope to break a guard mode line via localised routs. However, the barbarian signature and most iconic scaries, the nakeds, are (big surprise) naked. Their awfully low armour value means that they're easily countered by arrows/javelins/cav charges/high lethality.
Next unit? Chariots. They can suddenly be behind you and move swiftly, making them quite annoying. But again, they melt like butter against missiles.
Next unit? Druids. Heavy armour, okay, but when they chant they don't fight: that means you're one strong infantry unit down.
If you can somehow approach the enemy army with your scaries, you still need to be super careful: if you take heavy casualties and/or lose your key hammer/eagle units, BOOM!, your army melts like snow, and suddenly you're left with nothing to push.
All your scaries can be dealt with, no matter what: your intrinsic vulnerabilities as a barbarian faction (low armour, guard mode OPness, bad discipline) combine all together to make your life as a barbarian player as tough as possible. You are just out of the pit of complete uselessness thanks to your cavalry: despite not being awesome, it can get stuff done (unlike in vanilla EB where light cavalry is plain bad), so it's not that hopeless to buy cavalry at least.
The place where you usually find naked fanatics on the battlefield. |
And what about the Getai? They don't have access to scaries.
Well, the Getai have a billion boni. Strong medium archers + insane elite foot archers + good variety of horse archers = they can dominate almost every faction missile-wise apart from Pontos and steppes. Great skirmishers. Drapanai AND Bastarnai. Access to spear-phalanx units. Awesome general's bodyguards. Cordinau Orca. And the Getai are a tier 2 faction, which means that all of the above is sufficient to make them sufficiently playable (not to be confused with strong).
BARBARIAN BONUS IS APPLIED FOR A REASON.
If we want to do some theorycrafting, what can be done to give barbarians a substantial chance in anything else than mirror matchups or some limited edges over some specific builds? What if some gimmicky mechanics (fear on nakeds/chariots, chanting) get removed or nerfed?
Interesting post! Moral effect of druids plays an important role too. One championship was won in this way. On the other hand, Celtic cultures were renowned for their use of metals. A proposal would be to reduce the cost of armored units, which you mention in your post, in exchange for nerfing or removing "gimmicky" mechanics. And just an idea passed me by while reflecting on the accuracy of the word "gimmick" for the fear trait: as it doesn´t seem to be gimmick to cause fear to some other units, but not to all, what about an immune to fear trait for disciplined units, like legionnaires et cetera?
ReplyDeleteProblem is that many barbarian units are accessible also to several Hellenistic factions as mercs; if you decrease the cost of armour for barbarians they too would reap those benefits. Decreasing the cost of few barbarian factional units would result in less diversity in the playstyle and the variety of barbarian armies.
DeleteIt would be great to have access to an immunity to fear, as it would be great to have different degrees of fear, an activation based on whether the unit is fighting or not etc. Unfortunately there is no mechanic coded in the game with such an effect... Antisocialmunky used to claim that 14+ morale is the only way to be truly scary-proof, i.e. the unit doesn't run that easily when facing a double scare. This is a rough estimation (and, let's be realistic, the only one we will ever have) of the effects that scaries exert on an army. If you really really really want your line to be 100% scary-proof, you have to stick a chevron on those units.
Which championship was won by the use of druids, and who was the winner? I don't remember this specific occasion, but then again you recall more and better than me.