How anti-building is the onager line?

Due to the event brawl giving a free mangonel, and having a event mission that requires you raid an enemy base to steal a relic, I have had to use the mangonel as an anti-building unit.

which got me thinking.

How good is the line as as an anti building unit?

First, let's consider THE castle age anti-building unit. The Battering Ram.

The Battering Ram is an anti building attacking through having a massive 125 building bonus damage. Technically it has 2 melee damage, but castle age buildings have 2 melee armor, and even against targets with zero armor, that's only 2 damage, and they get an attack every 5 seconds.

That means by default rams deal 25 damage against buildings per second in the start of castle age.

Mangonels deal 40 melee damage and 35 anti building damage every 6 seconds for 75 per 6 seconds for 12.5 damage against unarmored building per second. taking of 2 damage for castle age buildings gets about 12 damage per second.

So mongonels are about half as good at killing castle age buildings without dedicated building tech.

Looks pretty good for a unit that also has massive army killing pontental.

However, buildings sometimes fight back with piering damage and sometimes have melee support.

Rams are obviously more resistant to piercing damage due to having massive 170 peirce armor and 175 hp, while mangonels have 6 pierce armor.

However mangonels do outrange town centers, which means that a single mangonel can easily put killing pressure on a TC with no losses, while rams can't.

However, against non-TC defenses, mangonels do much worse defensively. 6 pierce armor is not enough to prevent castles from killing them in two volleys, and all towers and castles outrange them, and 50 hp with 0 melee armor is actually less resistant to melee damage than 175 hp with -3 armor. 5 melee damage scouts kill mangonels in 10 hits while battering rams take 22 hits.

So yeah, you need to hope your opponent isn't microing their rowers and castles when using mangonels against them.

Still as a population efficient anti-building tool, mongonels are not the worst. Using them to fight building is good.

Finally, I would like to compare dps to a common raiding unit. The fully upgraded castle knight. Melee armor matters a large amount for knights, so the choice matters, and I would like to consider the game closer knight dps vs castle town center.

Knights deal 12-5=7 damage per attack every 1.8 seconds for 3.88 dps vs town centers.

So yeah, Mangonels are pretty anti-building, and can take town centers no sweat.