Talk:Throwing Axeman (Age of Empires II)/@comment-2409:4071:2293:314E:6DD8:F34F:C545:F937-20180816125903/@comment-2405:204:5102:4D8D:8511:6892:B728:FECC-20180830083015

I wish I could agree with you, MasterBroccoli

But no, Franks are severely weak in so many aspects which led me to study this Civ in detail. They are easily the weakest Civ in the game. The list of their weaknesses seem endless:

- They lack genuine counters to heavily armored units like the Elite Boyar, Elite Teutonic Knights and Elite Cataphracts. Also, Aztecian and Japanese Infantry!

- They lack Trash units (which are so essential) - lacklustre skirms, generic Halbs and low HP light cavalry is all they have

- Cavalry bonus is hardly useful: +12 HP for Pal, +4 HP for Cavalier and -8 HP for the Light Cavalry gives a net HP gain of only 8 HP. And for such a minor gain, they've severely nerfed the rest of the Civ

- Stables working 40% faster is hardly useful because any other Cav civ can build more stables and achieve same training speeds. And many times faster than Frankish stables. So Chivalry is essentially a 700 Free wood bonus (as u can build 4 more stables) and for this, a Franks player has to pay 400W and 400G  - seems unjustified! Moreover, other Civs get such bonuses for free ( Goths - faster barracks, Burmese +1 attack for Barracks per age, Japanese +33% infantry attack etc) while the Franks player has to research and pay for it. The Paladins are among the top 3 most expensive units of the game and one would rarely want to create these units faster as you tend to rapidly deplete your Gold resources leaving nothing left for siege

- Team Bonus is +2LOS - this is the cheapest tech in the game (Tracking is only 50 food, so assumably it'd be same for Cav units). So as Franks, you hardly lend anything worthwhile to your allies.

- Throwing Axeman has plenty of issues as I have pointed out in other threads. Bearded Axe is way too expensive for just 1 range for one unit. Noticeably, most other Civs have second Unique techs not costing any Gold but with Franks both techs do and totals a whopping 800 Gold

- Eco bonus of 25% faster foraging is not always useful as most popular maps have only 1 berry bush nearby. It;s totally worth only 25 food.

- Paladin counters (Pikes) are cheap and easy to mass so it's very simple and easy to play against the Franks. Also the knowledge that Franks don't have anything else - they just have one basic strategy. Axemen die easily against towers and castle fire and are slow therefore unfit for raiding. Their frame delay makes them even slower and because they LOS, they can be lured away by enemy Hussars.

- Free farm upgrades works only from the next reseed iteration, so it takes a while before having any effect on your farms

- Frankish Light Cavalry (only 72 HP)  can be taken down by a generic Halb in only 2 hits, while Halbs take 3 hits to kill a generic Light Cavalry (80HP) - this is one of the fastest kills in the game

- Frankish Pal can take 5 hits (vs 4 for other Pals) but the Halbs can be massed so cheaply that in masses 2 Halbs can kill Frank Pals quite rapidly - at almost no cost! Halbs are anyway expendable

- Franks don't have counters for Archers or Siege

- Frankish Cav Archer lacks most techs - might as well remove them from the archery range. Moreover, he has only 72 HP - even a Heavy Cav Archer