Results from some quick testing of the upcoming Cumans civ

With DE upcoming and some details of the 4 new civs released. I thought it would be interesting to look into one of the new civs by replicating as much as possible in a new mod and doing some playtests.

Firstly the Steppe Lancer

Disclaimer: all that follows is greatly simplified.

With a friend I tested patrolling Steppe Lancers into a variety of other types of units they might encounter, focussing on how they performed as a potential replacement to the knight line. Before doing these tests we expected Lancers to be poorer in a scenario where ranged support units were on the field, because of their low hp and pierce armour. We expected them to be superior to the knight line en masse in both castle and imperial age, even Paladins. Because of the different costs of the units (110v135 total res) tests were conducted based on total costs.

• 30v25 lancers lose to knights
• 30v25 elite lancers lose to cavalier AND paladins
• 60v49 lancers beat knights
• 60v49 elite lancers beat cavalier AND paladins
• 30/30v25/30 lancers/ca lose to knights/ca
• 30/30v25/30 elite lancers lose to cavalier/hca AND paladins/hca
• 60/60v49/60 lancers/ca lose to knights/ca
• 60/60v49/60 elite lancers beat cavalier/hca AND lose to paladin/hca

As you can see, lancers lost all engagements where small armies were fielded.

In larger engagements and where ranged units were present the lancers only won when the knight line was only upgraded to cavalier. Where ranged units were not present lancers beat paladins!

Secondly we mucked around with the potential of Feudal age tc's.

Disclaimer: take the following with two grains of salt as we could not numerically test this bonus, and were forced to rely on feelings. The Cuman player did win both games where good spots for tc's could be located pretty convincingly.

We found that the utility of this bonus on arabia was heavily dependant on the map, specifically if 4x4 flat terrain could be found in a reasonable location. We found that a scout build could easily be adjusted to go straight tc's or a handful of scouts and farms then tc's. The timing of the decision regarding what strategy would be taken was quite late, around halfway up to feudal age. This makes this strategy quite flexible, with the opponent unable to determine if they should be expecting scouts or tc's based on the build order until the barracks is/is not built. If you do go scouts as Cumans, its very simple to transition to tc's instead of ranges should your opponent be well defended from potential archers or if you did a lot of damage. Scouts also provides the potential to intercept any fast castle strategies involving forward villagers for siege or maybe a castle drop, which are probably the best counter to a feudal age boom.

Discuss.