The Organ Gun changes explained (AoE2 April patch)
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- čas přidán 10. 04. 2023
- A quick look at the 7 changes coming for organ guns in the April patch, and whether this is a nerf or a buff.
0:30 Current role of Organ Guns
1:00 The April changes
3:30 vs mass Pikemen
5:05 vs Crossbows
5:30 The importance of pierce armor
6:15 vs Elite Skirmishers
6:50 vs Buildings
7:35 Imperial Age
8:10 Final thoughts
9:15 Return of Rome release date
___________________________________________________________
Patreon: / spiritofthelaw
Background music from Epidemic Sound: www.epidemicsound.com
Game: Age of Empires II Definitive Edition - Hry
So basically they went from hard countering huskarls to being hard countered by huskarls
funny but true
Virgin Gunpowder Multi-barrel Cannon VS Chad Germanic Shields
@@MiniMackeroni Teutonic Knights: *grin*
very much nerfed. Paladins and even Malian infantry will shred them.
someone should make an organ gun visual mod that makes it shoot organs
The instrument or the body part?
@@mullerpotgieter I'd be happy with either. Maybe even both!
Play organ when it shoots
@@mullerpotgieter yes
I think the texture file for the organ gun projectile is the same as the hand cannoneer’s so that would be hard to distinguish
It's so strange that they tightened the dispersion cone so much. I think if they really want to make it a shotgun unit, they should really increase the damage each shot does and widen the dispersion cone more so it's actually good against groups of units rather than sniping individual units with a focused blast
Exactly that. If they want it to be good against groups they should make sure the spread is wide enough to ensure no single unit will ever be hit by more than 1-3 bullets and then balance individual bullet damage around that. If at max range only 1 bullet hits, and at minimum range 3, I think the dispersion will be quite reasonable.
I don't think they were meant as shotgun, more a multi-culverin thing?
@@Njuregen organ guns were pretty much a giant shotgun. This balance change, and keep in mind I don’t play this game, is complete bonkers. They’ve completely missed the mark again.
@@TheGeoCheese You are exactly correct despite not playing AoE2 DE.
They could also treat each individual projectile as Area of Effect (AoE) damage like the onager line and set the size of the AoE accordingly. That'd allow the organ gun to operate as a 'shotgun blast' that is determined by the dispersion cone AND determined by what units are in the zone of each projectile's AoE. So it'd be like an onager with 6 much smaller AoE's. Staggered formation would absolutely assist in spreading out the damage amongst more units, but it would not result in outright damage reduction which appears to be the core issue here.
Plus the idea of an organ gun only being able to impact 6 units max is too easy to cheese with skirmishers, as SotL has demonstrated. But by using AoE the size of the unit within a cluster of units would determine the overall damage, just like onager shots. So 6 shots might only impact 6 cavalry units at best but that same shot might impact 12 infantry on average, 18 at the theoretical maximum.
Staggered formation would therefore always reduce the average impacted unit to 6 (or 5 counting miss chance), rather than resulting in several missed shots or a single unit soaking up too much damage at once. End result: shotgun BLAST.
Turning the Organ Gun into an AoE wide-spread shotgun makes a lot of sense to set them apart. It's what they look like they should be as a unit in the first place!
EDIT: Welp, after the tests, I guess it still isn't that. :U
Yeah I think they should be absolutely devastating against groups but at the moment they really are not that scary.
Onigers have the same general concept as what you want, and I think are the closest we will get.
Good point! :)
@@suddenllybah With less accuracy (bigger spread) and bigger dmg it would have that effect.
Its still like a shotgun, just with a really tight hunting choke :v
They should add some extra damage for each bullet but drastically increase the dispersion, far more than it was before.
The problem is, once they're massed, what will stop them? They would melt everything you threw at them, archers too since they have high pierce armor
@@darkunor6687 mangonels and cannons should do the trick
@@darkunor6687 Distraction siege rams backed up by onagers and/or cannons?
@@Ironmaidenportugal yeah that would be a good counter, but Portuguese can make cannons of their own, but a meat wall of pikes in front and we have a death ball in our hands
I think it would be cool if they increase dispersion so that the maintarget 5 tiles away would get hit on average by 2 Projectiles and the other 3-4 hit sorounding units. they should also get the arambai-treatment, so that strayshots deal full instead of half dmg.
Next i would lower their fire rate ab bit. Still faster than mangonels(6.25s) but slower than HC and current OG(3.45s). Maybe flat 5s.
Then increase dmg numbers ~+5 or +6, get rid of bonusdmg vs Infantry (redundant with hc). Slower Attacks with more of a punch would feel better imo.
Maybe give them negative bonusdmg vs stonebuildings for balance. it makes sense, that OG shred through wooden houses and stables, but they shouldn't be too effective vs stone-buildings.
I love your effort in giving a unique name to all the groups of units.
The recoil before firing is actually (somewhat) historically accurate. The black powder they used back then was much less efficient than modern gunpowder so you would feel the recoil before the bullet left the barrel. With muskets and the like, people would actually aim below their target because the recoil would push the barrel upward before the bullet left.
While the effect you describe is real, it isn't exclusive to black powder. Even very fast modern smokeless cartridges will inevitably tip the barrel up enough before leaving it to have an effect on the point of impact. It's just something you have to take in to account when zeroing a firearm. And while the effect is more pronounced with slower bullets, it's never going to be slow enough that a person would actually feel the recoil before the bullet leaves the barrel. Black powder is lower pressure than smokeless, but not that much lower. A musket ball fired from a brown bess has roughly the same muzzle velocity as a a bullet fired from a 9mm handgun while being several times heavier.
What was slower about early firearms was lock time, the time between pulling the trigger (or the archaic equivalent thereof) and the primary charge going off. With the matchlocks that were in use during the time period covered by AoE 2, there can be a delay of multiple countable seconds between the ignition of the priming powder and the gun actually going off. This leaves plenty of time for the shooter to wiggle about, flinch, and otherwise move off target making precision shooting quite a bit more difficult.
Guy never shot a real gun 😂
The guns seemed to me like they were just positioning themselves.
The first thing I thought when I saw this change in the Patch Notes was that it'd make for a great SotL video.
id consider this a major nerf. getting slightly better against things they were already good at does not make up for half of the counters becoming hard counters. now 1 mangonel will immediately completely shut down any castle age aggression. a chain is as strong as its weakest link. easy to counter -> bad unit.
Yeah, don't know why they did that. I don't think It was a broken unit... Now they are useless
So you may have to have a unit composition now instead of spamming one unit? I'm sorry everyone.
@@WastelandMedic93 why would u make organ guns intead of scorpions?
@@WastelandMedic93 While I completely agree in principle, in practice Portugal's composition options are pretty meh. It's why they excelled in team games and did well in closed maps but are exceptionally weak on open maps.
A minor nerf to Organ Guns' pressure play was justified, but completely gutting it makes the unit 100% useless in all but the most esoteric and unlikely matchups. Like, seriously; who exactly spams walls of pikemen in Castle Age, and nothing else?
@booradley6832 Sandy couldn't iterate like the new devs can; the original game was not balanced in multilayer, hence the infamous hun wars on Arabia. And when AoC came out, Franks went from very strong, to very weak. I have much respect for Sandy, but they weren't perfect then, as the current devs aren't now
Rest in peace for all the brave men who died from those guns so that you could bring us this data!
I'd be interested to see a modded version demonstrating higher damage (maybe 10)? With a much higher dispersion
I think even just 8 (2 dmg vs champion side projectile) and then make the main charge a lil bit better again 9-12 dmg, increase spread by alot. Probably would make it alot nicer to use, and if it's too strong they should increase it's creation time, and cost, and maybe reduce it's movement.
I say its an overall nerf, the small advantage vs low armor trash doesnt make up for all the downsides. Also there are plenty of options to deal with those if necessary
@SpiritOfTheLaw You showed a none-elite Organ Gun in blue on the top of the screen when they shooting the paladins at 7:55 . But i am sure You did the test with the elite version like you are telling us in this part :)
IMO, for the intended purpose, a mix between pre-patch and post-patch would have made more sense: Damage and dispersion cone of the pre-patched version (or maybe a little less damage if it's too much), 0% accuracy and all bullets dealing the same damage (and all of them being impacted by pierce armor) as with the post-patch version.
Hi SOTL
I really like the new way you compare units side by side.
In general, well done with showing and explaining what’s going on.
I look forward for more april patch content and Civs overviews.
The change is a MASSIVE NERF to Organ Guns because of their role in Castle-age pressure-play vs buildings and ability to stymie their intended cavalry counters via massed slugging; that single big pellet was vital to their viability, and now that it's gone so too is their viability as a unit pretty much everywhere but vs massed infantry (which itself is a relative rarity).
Without the ability to pressure buildings, portugese will HAVE to lean even heavier into siege (build rams/mangonels) which just makes them even easier to counter since they can't fight back as easily vs monks and cavalry.
The video showed them having close to a 60% win rate, in gaming terms that is disgustingly overpowered. 54%-56% is already a clear indicator of being OP. The nerfs seem like too much.
I thought making them a bit slower, reducing their pierce armor, or making them worse vs mangonels would have been a fine change.
That was the intention, nerf the Portos using the OrganGuns as a Castle Age Arena win condition
Its needed change, bc what to do for civs that dont have access to redemption/guard tower? Agressive CD still legit for portu, need more than 1 mangonel to stop orgun guns and adjustment for potru - to add monks for keeping pressure.
I don't contest that they were OP; the problem is that by gutting organ guns to such an extreme degree guts a big part of their core strategy.
Now they're fully relegated to playing pocket on closed team arena games because their other offensive lineups aren't anything special and are just kinda hoping to fast-Imp so they can start printing Feitorias for backline resource slinging.
To put this into perspective: Imagine halving the base damage of the Mongols' Mangudai and making it only effective vs siege.
You'd cripple a significant part of their key strategy. Of course, it's actually a bit worse than that because unlike the Mongols, Portugal doesn't have the incredible offensive tech lineup the Mongols do.
A thing that might be cool for a follow up video is to look at is the Napoleonic/naval warfare concept of "Crossing the T" with organ guns, where a horizontal oriented group of units firing at a vertically oriented group of units is much more effective. Scorpions for example would do significantly better in that regard- hitting 10 units with 1 projectile vs 3 with the 3 rows of 10. I am not sure if it extends to organ guns. Seems like many of the strays are passing through, theoretically they would have less room to miss when crossing the T, but it's possible they might have even more room to miss. Anyway, might be a fun thing to look at, not clear which way is better without testing.
I noticed the odd firing animation early on in the video and you them calling it out was perfect
I've been waiting for the orjan gun video!
Thank you for the new video!
I know you made an updated best civilizations video only about a month ago, but I would absolutely love another one soon because of this huge update!
Interesting change overall, though in my opinion they should have maybe made the overall damage a bit lower and had it unaffected by pierce armor since a big difference between crossbows and early fire arms isn't the "damage" so to speak as much as that fire arms could pierce even heavy armor
Not necessarily true. It could definitely pierce weaker and thinner armour, but guns still couldn't pierce strong breastplates and helmets.
@@beganfish right, that was the original meaning of bulletproof armor.
Although I've always questioned the usefulness of such thing if the trauma could cause you internal bleeding anyway.
@@endless2239 Because the amount of internal bleeding caused by a bullet striking your armour was probably considerably less than if it were to strike your chest with nothing in the way. It's the reason they started making thicker breastplates that were curved, to help deflect more of the incoming force.
Love your content.
Wouldn't it be better to have more stark color comparisons? Instead of cyan and blue, cyan and red or something similar? Those two colors can be hard to spot
it might be good to see a comparison also at maximum range, in your video i saw many secondary bullet being overshot so they did't reach any target. and also I believe that if they are supposed to work as a complementary unit as you said, they are going to work at maximum range most of the times. Also the cone dispersion will be shown more effectively.
By far my favourite CZcamsr! You have come such a long way and I really love you analysing the game! Fantastic! 😊
such a wonderfully explained video! thanks!! :)
Videos like this are what brought me back to Age of Empires
That little announcement at the end could have been great (still can!) as a short!
I hope the devs address the now small cone of fire, they could add a bit more dmg to the shots if the cone of fire was a bit larger. On small groups of enemy units "a lot more" shots would be missing the target and on larger groups of enemies they would act like the shotgun they already look like.
They can keep the lowered att stat and still adding the 2 ignored armor damage, make them actually like an infantry counter like Hand Cannoneer but better
Yes! Funky outro music is back!
oh ya big question i wanted answered ty SOTL
The captions call it the "Oregon gun" a few times which is great
In Miunute 4:50 u speak of Recoil before fiering ..
i would say to move they have to lift the gun up.. so the recoil u see is the end of the gun pushed to the ground so it dont move during the shot :)
I think they should increase the number of projectiles. Test that out on a closed beta/test patch and see how it goes.
Early firearms usually tore through light armor, and only heavy metal plate stopped it consistently. Perhaps add a slight light bleed dot effect for anything hit by multiple of the same attack (like each projectile does a small add to a counter, with a quick decay time so if 2 projectiles hit the same thing, its likely to proc).
It'd make massing your guns more proper for mowing down a line.
Alternatively, make the elite upgrade double the spread and projectiles to allow it to be a massive crowd controller when grouped up.
Love your vids SOTL
I actually like the idea of each projectile now doing equal damage each as it now puts a bigger focus on their spread shot capability as an organ gun should be doing, causing mass damage to all units rather then just doing full damage to one and only 1 or 2 damage to everyone else. But perhaps they should do more work on it.
Rome dlc release date in roman numbers is a great touch ! Love the details
Considering that the Organ Gun was already performing poorly against high pierce armor units, but was used in castle mainly against archers and infantry, I would call this patch an adjustment ; it got a bit better in it's specialty, and much worse in the roles where you shouldnt be using them in the first place.
But yeah I would definitely have rather seen a slightly wider cone, and projectiles that deal 3 or 4 damage with the elite upgrade than a straight up Organ Gun SSSniper
I'd say it's still an interesting adjustment to the Organ Gun, and I wonder if they'll patch it again in the next few patches if they see the feedback from the community
Well, this defeats the idea of them being gunpowder units. The new mechanics look almost like a siege engine launching multiple arrows, instead of a gunpowder unit. Normally, this should work like 7 hand cannoneer guns bunched together, so it's strange that they work more like arrows than bullets. They should have much higher individual damage, and pay for that by having a wider spread, and maybe slower reload.
No wonder Sotl has so many organic views. He goes straight to the guts of the subject and eviscerates it.
I wonder what the logic behind organ guns being more effective against staggered formation is. Maybe there is a cap to the number of shots a unit can take and being in such a tight cluster makes it easier for some of the shots to be wasted. Though I'm not sure why it would work that way. What could make spreading units out make organ guns actually deal more damage from the full randomness and tighter spread?
I'd be interested in seeing how they'd fair if their cone was widened and their damage was increased to 8~9 non-elite, and 10~11 elite. I'm fine with them being a back-line/support unit (a Scorpion alternative, basically), but I don't think they're fully living up to the "good vs. tightly-packed groups" design.
Also of note, Portuguese tech tree is almost as diverse as Chinese.
They just get gunpowder units in exchange for no HCA and slower infantry (which is fine since organ guns can force engagement with pikes).
Was there a graph for the castle age organ gun which did not make the video? Appreciate the Imp graph.
A mass of Organ Guns with standing your ground with Bombard Cannons alongside to deal with buildings in the Portuguese Campaign in Age of Empires 2 DE were a lot of fun to use if you ask me. :3
porcupine, quiver and tickle are great, i was just missing the cavalcade
So basically, Organ Guns went from being their own, organic (HEH) unit to "Worse Hand Cannoneers, but one age earlier". I guess in a way, it works at reducing their Castle Age powerspike (like the Conquistador changes!)
4:51 talking about animations, a cleanup could be done to samurais so they dont draw their sword every half a second for no reason
Also, militia line is getting gambesons... which is another nerf to the organ gun which is now exclusively good against spear line... maybe?
As for the animations, smoke before recoil is fine especially for flintlock or matchlock based weapons as the powder in the pan burns for a couple fractions of a second before the shot goes off
You got it exactly backwards. The issue is it’s currently recoiling before the smoke (by a lot)
increasing the dispersion with the new model of each bullet being relevant is only going to mean that the organ gun can't kill anything. The only way they are gonna be able to make it a real anti group unit is to give it some splash or pierce through damage. Obviously those would be quite frightening to implement, but a bit of pierce through seems like you could make it work with a bit of wiggle room
It could be interesting that they continue on the new version but greatly increase the spread to like a 90° cone and add more projectiles. The unit would never hit at max range but would instantly melt anything that comes melee.
Actually, increasing base damage of projectiles instead of increasing the number of projectiles would make more sense when increasing the spread.
Top video
I'm curious how you would seek to adjust the organ gun. I don't like the result here much but I'd be interesting in some edits like: increase spread, change damage to 12-(tile range), perhaps remove the minimum range piece.
More projectiles, less damage, broader dispersion. Bonus damage versus buildings and ships (wooden things), NOT SO versus defensive buildings (stone things). No bonus damage versus units, but projectiles can pass through/penetrate doing less damage as they do. (Or even do the opposite. Only penetrate one unit and the unit behind receives extra damage implying that the projectile got stuck in them as it is better for a bullet to go through you than to be in you).
Hey spirit, are you planning on picking up the new Chaos Dwarf dlc for total warhammer?
At 8:15, The left side shows Elite OG, the right the new non-elite version. Is that intended? Or was it tested with the same game version and editor shennanigans?
Ok Thanks !
When this patch will be come ?
I think they should make the organ gun shots immune to armor but decrease there damage even more to 5
Also they should increase spread by a lot after above said change.
Could make 4 damage non elite.
That would be ideal
Why should they ignore armor?
@@IndexInvestingWithCole to have guaranteed but balanced damage
@@IndexInvestingWithCole because armor never worked against gunpowder weapons. In the game they do, but all other gunpowder units have immense dmg, so scalar value of armor didn't affect them that much. It is same with organ gun: armor ignoring small projectiles and one projectile with immense damage. After the change however, just like SOTL showed armor can make it lose nearly all of its damage output. It's neither realistic nor how it worked in the game so far
Could you do a follow-up to show how the Organ Gun performs with other units in a formation? I'm curious to see if this is meant to accompany a shift in the Portuguese playstyle or if the comments all going "BIG NERF BAD WAH WAH" are right in their declaration.
lol a tickle of skirmishers got a chuckle out of me for sure
The Arambai has a pretty nice spray effect. If they want to have something similar for the organ gun, why haven't the devs used similar unit stats in regards to accuracy and so on as the arambai have it.
I'm seriously curious how they perform compared again resource equivalent scorpions. That's their closest alternative, I think?
I'm thinking even more dispersion and several more projectiles. That would also make it less useless against cavalry close up, which I think an expensive gold unit should not be useless against.
4:40 Taking a wild guess is that due to the staggered formation, the Organs may not overkill as much as they do when they're all bunched together. Maybe stray bullets more often hit a different target, doing full damage as opposed to hitting a 1-HP pre-damaged targets and losing effectiveness.
I don't see it. I actually think it is the opposite... They are doing full damage to the intended target instead of half the damage of stray projectiles to nearby enemies.
On the other hand it also made the 5 organ guns more frequently target different enemies which for prenerfed ones would indeed reduce overkill and for new ones it would spread their damage better as pointed out above.
@@raizan5946 honestly good point and probably a combination of both lol
Shooting Samurais with an gun like that kinda reminds me The Last Samurai Movie
Hey Spirit, I know you're probably busy with the new patch stuff, but I have a weird specific question: what's the villager ratio you need on wood to support x number of farms?
10
3
Spam new Villagers to Wood, taking one off whenever you have enough Wood to build a Farm. Repeat until you get to 40-50 Farms.
@@dembro27 This is too simplistic. 1. This implies you won't have enough wood to build other things as you're always building farms. 2. This implies every lumberjack will eventually go to a farm. Now, we all know this isn't happening. Which begs the original question: how many lumberjacks to support 40-50 farms?
@@curlywhites I should have clarified "new Villagers in Castle Age", thanks.
How did the following hotfix change things from this video? Did it make them better or worse?
Maybe they'll tweak it some more before the patch goes thru to better get their vision
In the April patch collision size of fishing ships and trade cogs was reduced. Does this mean they are now more efficient than before? And if so, how much?
If they wanted these to be effective against groups, why not instead give them a tiny bit of splash?
Valid question, but I think splash damage is reserved for larger projectiles ie onager shots, cannon balls
Because they aren’t intended to splash
Just increase the damage from the projectiles.
Splash would also damage units in the 2nd row, which I think is not the inteded effect of this unit
in the 10x team bonus mod units are usually unbreakable tanks and fights take long.
this change however... is scary.
from 56 base dmg (+8 from other projectiles) the elite organ gun now shoots up to a crazy 16x27 dmg - still nothing against high pierce specialists (huskarls, malian infantry, etc) but incredibly strong against anything else. let's say there is a building with 12 pierce armor. elite organ gun then still has a dmg potential of 16x16 = 256 per hit.
I see what staggered was doing.
Most misses were overshoot, the extra damage versus staggered was the bullet drop allowing them to still hit when overshooting.
To make a perfect comparison normally you should repeat all the tests of this video. Once firing at max range and once firing at min range. (But i foresee that the results will be pretty close here. It would differ more if they changed only the spread radius or only the accuracy.)
8:05 Why do you compare elite organ guns with normal ones? doesn't that defeat the purpose? Or is just the overlay wrong?
This is going to make playing Arena so much better
Nice 😍
Isn't there an effect where 'missed' projectiles are blocked by object height? Like with fire ships. Is that going to effect organ guns?
A lot of Infantry will be pretty solid versus Organ Gun too, Thanks to that new Tech.
They should increase the spread and give it the ability to ignore some piercing armor (like, 2 or 3 armor piercing) to make it feel more like a "shotgun" while not increasing its maximum damage, just min damage and making it more useful against high pierce armor units while not changing its effectiveness vs low pierce armor
Dosen't recoil happen when the shot is fired and not when the shot leaves the barrel? So it would make sens for the recoil animation to be one or two frames before the one of the projectiles leaving the barrel
To me, it seems that the Organ guns seems to be an ideal unit to deal with micro-ranged units, archers and such moving around shooting, since their shots disperses a bit and can possibly hit one or multiple targets with low armor
That makes a lot of sense. hand canoneers are kind of archers, too, so why shouldn't organ guns also be countered by skirms? It also makes much more sense that they are kind of a "archer onager" just like you would expect. That makes them standout without being overpowered.
Maybe the missing damage against buildings is due to some of the projectiles going in through one open window and out through another!
using 2 shades of blue that are already similar on units that have like 4 colour stripes is a stroke of genius i gotta say
yeah I kinda agree, recent teal and blue color choice has poor contrast. I'm not so ape brained I can't tell. But out of all the colors he could have chosen he picks the 2 most similar lol yeah big brain move for sure
This comment is the internet at its worst. Someone took their time to make something for you and offer it for free, but because you disagree with one decision, you leave a rude and entitled response. Yuck.
It's actually easier for colour blind people to tell them apart than many other colour combinations, due to the large difference in brightness.
how many 'anti-low-pierce-armor' units do we have at this point
How about splash damage for the main projectile?
I'd have called it a Hedge of Pikemen but porcupine works well also tbh
The organ gun should be like Chu ko nu(which is also and effective crowd control unit), the barrels don't shoot at the same time, it shots in chain.
first shot hit full damage and the others 4 do 2 damage hitting the same target with some spread with tiny splash damage.
I want to see how they do against huskarls
What happens if you compare them to the same number of crossbows? As this seems to be like they're suppose to do the same job.
They could change the animation to match its aoe3 counterpart where it fires its round one barrel at a time.
I'm unsure as to how the new organ gun is not just a weaker Scorpion? They play the same role at the same range, except Scorpions with their higher attack don't get wrecked by pierce armor as much.. right?
On the better accuracy despite 0% accuracy. Doesn’t this mean they can’t fire over walls anymore? Like fire ships?
Plus you can keep skirms in front taking very little damage and xbows or whatever safe behind?
Does anyone know when this April patch is getting released?
Wow, I never knew a group of pikemen was called a "porcupine". You learn something new every day.
If I see portugese on arena, I already know I lost. I try to stop the castle, then go monks and light cav, but it never works. I can usually survive the castle age attack, but by the time I've stabilized they hit imp and just treb me down. I'm hoping this makes a skirm defense viable.
The last time I was this early Portuguese still sucked.
I think the bunching up causes more stray bullet hits instead of all the bullets hitting the main target but since you deal reduced damage to targets other than your primary one it is actually worse for you to get stray hits instead of regular hits.
They made it 0% accurate though so doesn’t it always miss?
Maybe they should give it 2 extra damage against infantry and archers for all projectiles, possibly reducing it's normal damage by 1 again.
As well as slightly increase the spread.
I think it would make it work better for what it is intended.