First of all, unless you read the news section, the Nomadic Pack is here and they are FREE until the 29th of October . Steam does not auto-download it for you so you need to do so manually.
Secondly, the pack offers three new factions--Roxolani, Massagetae, and Royal Scythia--all have huge selection of melee and range cavalry but no infantry.
*edit* It seems they do have infantry units in single player, jsut not in MP battles. Should be fun besieging walled towns, unless you recruit foot mercenaries. Their victory conditions also requires you to raze or sack certain amount of cities, so blitz style players should find that fun.
Thirdly, these nomadic horsemen are bringing back the Cantabrian Circle--an ability that is loved and hated equally by MP players. I tested it, and the ability does negate at least half of all incoming missile damage from archers and slingers. Scorpions are however, effective against C-Circle and we will see them more and more frequently, I suppose. Surprisingly, Parthia does not get the Cantabrian Circle, which is a bummer.
Fourthly--the inclusion of the ability "Heavy Shot" for most horse archers in game. What Heavy Shot does is to grant 8 armor piercing to cavalry arrows at the cost of range and accuracy. However, the accuracy penalty should be negated partially by being at closer range to shoot.
Heavy shot basically changes the game. Before, it was not ammo efficient to shoot at heavily armored foes using horse archers. Now, the horse archers with Heavy Shot willdevastate heavy armored units if those units do not have fast cavalry support. Especially since horse archers already have "Precision Shot"--which further increases missile damage at the cost of fatigue. When both shot abilities are used together, it is very, very effective, to say the least.
Needless to say, this will have huge effect on the MP battles, and seeing how the basic counter against these more deadly missile cavalry is to spam a lot of melee cavalry, we might see a lot of cavalry combat over pike spam when these factions are played. (Psst, play Pontus if you really want to throw people off since they can spam both cavalry archers and heavy infantry--which means a big dilemma for your opponent)
Your thoughts?
Secondly, the pack offers three new factions--
*edit* It seems they do have infantry units in single player, jsut not in MP battles. Should be fun besieging walled towns, unless you recruit foot mercenaries. Their victory conditions also requires you to raze or sack certain amount of cities, so blitz style players should find that fun.
Thirdly, these nomadic horsemen are bringing back the Cantabrian Circle--an ability that is loved and hated equally by MP players. I tested it, and the ability does negate at least half of all incoming missile damage from archers and slingers. Scorpions are however, effective against C-Circle and we will see them more and more frequently, I suppose. Surprisingly, Parthia does not get the Cantabrian Circle, which is a bummer.
Fourthly--the inclusion of the ability "Heavy Shot" for most horse archers in game. What Heavy Shot does is to grant 8 armor piercing to cavalry arrows at the cost of range and accuracy. However, the accuracy penalty should be negated partially by being at closer range to shoot.
Heavy shot basically changes the game. Before, it was not ammo efficient to shoot at heavily armored foes using horse archers. Now, the horse archers with Heavy Shot will
Needless to say, this will have huge effect on the MP battles, and seeing how the basic counter against these more deadly missile cavalry is to spam a lot of melee cavalry, we might see a lot of cavalry combat over pike spam when these factions are played. (Psst, play Pontus if you really want to throw people off since they can spam both cavalry archers and heavy infantry--which means a big dilemma for your opponent)
Your thoughts?
[This message has been edited by el_bandito (edited 10-23-2013 @ 05:54 AM).]