The swordsmen problem

written 2026-04-06

This is a post about a balance problem in Age of Empires 2, Age of Empires 4, and maybe other medieval strategy games.

In these games, you can choose from different kinds of soldiers to make, and each one is strong and weak against certain other kinds. In Age of Empires 4, there are only 3 units available in the early game: spearmen, archers, and horsemen, and they form a counter triangle like you'd expect: archers counter spearmen, horsemen counter archers, and spearmen counter horsemen.

This makes sense because it's an obvious application of basic unit design space: ranged units counter slow melee units because they get a bunch of free attacks while the melee units approach, fast units counter ranged units because the ranged units get *fewer* free attaks while they approach, and slow units counter fast units because the speed doesn't help in a melee fight and the slow units have better stats to compensate for being slow.

That was... not true. In practice, archers don't counter spearmen because of the free attacks. They only get a few, while a spearman's health is 16x an archer's base damage. Instead, they counter them because they do double damage to them. And horsemen don't counter archers because of their speed, but because they take 40% less damage from them and also do double damage. And spearmen don't have better stats than horsemen (at least, not by much), they just do 3.5x damage to them.

It's a bit disappointing that the seemingly emergent, strategic counters are really mostly because of artificial bonuses. But at least the triangle works as intended. But what about the more advanced units? In the next tech level, you unlock 3 more unit types:

Men-at-arms, a 'heavy' infantry unit with a sword and shield, which has no damage bonus against cavalry but better base stats than spearmen. It beats horsemen, but not by as much as spearmen do.

Knights, a 'heavy' cavalry unit with better base stats than horsemen or men-at-arms, but no damage bonus aganst ranged units.

Crossbowmen, like archers with worse base stats and no damage bonus against spearmen, but instead a damage bonus against anything 'heavy'.

Knights and crossbowmen work as intended; knights are strong generalists that beat everything except spearmen and crossbowmen; horsemen beat crossbowmen too, but are worse generalists than knights.

But what's the use case of men-at-arms? They're not especally strong against anything, and are also the slowest of all these units. Mostly, they just compare unfavorably with knights. Both are melee generalists, but knights are stronger than men-at-arms and also faster. Sure, knights are countered by spearmen while men-at-arms aren't, but knights beat archers and horsemen by more than men-at-arms do, and lose to crossbowmen by less. Plus, there's other units in the game (siege weapons like springalds and mangonels), which soft-counter men-at-arms but are countered by knights. So men-at-arms don't even have fewer counters, just different ones.

Why is it designed like this? I think because people's intuition is that heavy cavalry should beat heavy infantry when those infantry aren't putting up a wall of spears. I'm not sure how realistic it is for them to be stronger even considering the higher cost of cavalry, but let's put that aside. This type of design would make sense in a game like Chess where you don't choose which units to produce. In Chess, queen is blatantly the strongest piece and that's fine. In games like this, it's not.

Comparing men-at-arms and knights to the light units they're similar to, it seems fair: each one gives up a damage bonus, a little speed, and becomes vulnerable to crossbowmen in return for stronger base stats. I think the problem is just in the quantity: knights are stronger than horsemen by more than men-at-arms are stronger than spearmen.

But you can't just solve this problem by buffing men-at-arms, because they're currently very close to causing a balance problem themselves. Because they're strong against all units that can be made in early game, if you get to the next tech level slightly faster than your opponent, you can spam man at arms and they're kind of uncounterable.

So I think the real root of the problem is the lack of a low-tech counter to men-at-arms. That forces them to be underpowered so that low-tech units can still kind of hold their own against them.

In Age of Empires 2, the details of the problem are slightly different. There, archers and crossbowmen are merged into one unit which hard counters spearmen, soft counters swordsmen and is soft countered by cavalry (both kinds). But I think the cause is mostly the same: swordsmen have to be worse than knights because there isn't a hard counter to them until late game.