06 · Units & Battle

Status: Draft — roster and damage model specified · Owner: TBD · Updated: 2026-09-23

Purpose

Define armies and combat — the system that has to carry the Age of Empires half of the pitch. This is the highest-risk page in the document.

To define

• Control model: auto-resolve, tactical pause, or real-time control
• Unit roster: five classes (see below); tiers and per-dynasty uniques still open
• The counter triangle — defined; how it is surfaced to the player still open
• Combat resolution maths — multipliers set, but base damage, HP values and the resolution formula still need a spreadsheet
• Army composition rules: stack size, march capacity, formations
• Wounded vs dead, hospital capacity, healing cost
• Siege vs walls: multiplier set (2.0×); wall HP, gates, garrison strength and shields still open
• Rally mechanics (multi-player attacks) — see Alliances
• Battle report: what the loser learns and how it teaches them
• Terrain, high ground, river crossings — do they exist at all?

Unit roster

Five classes. Four line units in a counter triangle plus a ranged specialist, and siege as a separate role that exists to break walls.

Class	Role	Health	Counters	Countered by
Swordman	Line infantry	Normal	Pikemen	Cavalry
Pikemen	Anti-cavalry infantry	Normal	Cavalry	Swordman
Cavalry	Shock / raid	Normal	Swordman	Pikemen
Marksman	Ranged damage	Poor	Everything except siege	(unresolved — see below)
Siege	Wall breaker	Normal	Buildings and walls	Everything, in the field

The counter triangle

Damage model

Rows attack, columns defend. Values are damage multipliers applied to the attacker's base damage.

Attacker ↓ / Defender →	Swordman	Pikemen	Cavalry	Marksman	Siege	Wall / Building
Swordman	1.0	2.0	1.0	1.0	1.0	0.5
Pikemen	1.0	1.0	2.0	1.0	1.0	0.5
Cavalry	2.0	1.0	1.0	1.0	1.0	0.5
Marksman	1.5	1.5	1.5	1.5	1.0	0.5
Siege	0.5	0.5	0.5	0.5	0.5	2.0

Rules in words

1. Counter triangle — Swordman beats Pikemen, Pikemen beats Cavalry, Cavalry beats Swordman.
2. Marksman deals 1.5× to every unit class except siege, which it hits for 1.0×. Its health is poor — it is a glass cannon.
3. Walls — every unit deals 50% less damage to walls and buildings, unless it is a siege weapon.
4. Siege deals half damage to units and double damage to buildings. Its health is normal.

The 2.0 triangle multiplier is a placeholder

You specified the triangle directionally ("swordman best pikemen") without a number. It is set to 2.0 here, and that choice is load-bearing — see Marksman has no counter below. Tune it in the combat spreadsheet, not here.

Worked example

100 Cavalry attack a garrison of 100 Pikemen behind a wall.

• Cavalry → Pikemen is 1.0× (Pikemen counter Cavalry, not the reverse).
• Pikemen → Cavalry is 2.0×.
• The wall must be broken first, and Cavalry hit it at 0.5×.

The attack fails twice over: wrong unit against the defender, and no siege to open the wall. That is the lesson the battle report has to teach in one screen.

Think about

• Marksman has no counter, and that is a hole in the design. It deals 1.5× to all four other unit classes and nothing deals bonus damage back. The triangle units at least lose to something; marksman only loses to poor health. Whether that is enough depends entirely on one unanswered question: does marksman have range? If it fires before melee closes, low health never gets tested and marksman is strictly dominant — mass marksman becomes the only army anyone builds, and the triangle you designed stops mattering. If it has no range advantage and simply trades, low health is a genuine drawback and the class is fine. Three ways to close the hole, in order of how little they disturb your spec:
  1. Cavalry deals bonus damage to Marksman (2.0×, as it does to Swordman). This is the classic solution — cavalry runs down archers — and it costs nothing structurally. It makes the roster a triangle with a fourth unit hanging off cavalry.
  2. Marksman cannot fire while engaged in melee, so whoever closes the distance turns off its damage entirely.
  3. Marksman deals 1.0× against the unit that counters its current target — more elegant, much harder to explain on a phone. Option 1 is the recommendation.
• The triangle bonus must beat 1.5× by a clear margin, or the triangle is decoration. If a counter is worth 1.5× and marksman is also 1.5× against everything, then marksman is never worse than a correctly-countering unit and is usually better. At 2.0× the triangle is meaningfully stronger than the generalist, which is why it is set there. Anything below about 1.8× makes composition irrelevant and the answer to every battle becomes "bring marksman".
• Siege is balanced but fragile by design, and that is correct. Half damage to units, no bonus from marksman, and every class hits it at 1.0× — siege loses any field fight it is left alone in. That forces escorting, which is real composition thinking and the best strategic texture in your current spec. Make sure the march UI makes escorting siege easy, or players will simply stop bringing it and walls will become unbreakable.
• Nothing here says what happens to defending walls. Walls at 0.5× from non-siege gives defenders a strong advantage, but you have not defined wall HP, whether walls regenerate, whether gates can be targeted separately, or whether garrisoned units fight at full strength. Those numbers decide whether a server is warlike or frozen — see Seasons.
• Five classes is the right number to launch with. It is enough for real composition decisions and few enough to balance and to explain in a tutorial. Resist adding a sixth until the first five are proven in playtest — per-dynasty unique units are the better place to add variety, because they can be balanced against a stable core.
• This is where the two source games collide hardest. AoE combat is real-time, positional and skill-expressive. Mobile 4X combat is a formula resolved server-side in milliseconds with a results screen. Options:
  1. Auto-resolve with deep pre-battle choice — cheap, scales, proven; but the AoE promise becomes "composition puzzle", not "battle".
  2. Tactical layer with limited real-time control (lane assignment, ability timing, formation swaps mid-fight) — the honest middle; substantially more tech, netcode and balance work.
  3. Full real-time RTS battles — delivers the pitch, but is a different genre's budget, needs synchronous matchmaking, and excludes low-end devices. Choose before anything else on this page is written. Everything — server architecture, art budget, session length, monetisation — follows from it.
• Counters must be readable on a phone, mid-fight, at a glance. If a player cannot tell why they lost, they conclude they lost because they didn't pay. The battle report is a teaching tool, not a receipt — show the counter that broke them.
• Power-vs-skill banding. Decide how much a composition advantage can overcome a raw power deficit — 10%? 40%? This single number decides whether your game is "strategy" or "spreadsheet", and whether whales are unbeatable.
• Wounded-vs-dead is the war economy. If losses are permanent, players stop attacking and the map goes quiet. If everything heals cheaply, there are no stakes. Hospital capacity with an overflow-to-dead rule is the standard answer and it is standard because it works.
• Defender advantage sets the map's temperature. Too strong and nothing ever happens; too weak and new players are farmed off the server in week one. Pair it with shields/protection and a beginner grace period.
• Unique units are the payoff of the dynasty premise. Khmer war elephants, Sassanid cataphracts, Champa river raiders. Make them feel different in kind — a stat bonus is forgettable, a rule change is not.
• Do not ship one battle type. Field battles, city sieges, resource-node contests and PvE monster hunts pace differently and serve different players. Plan the set even if you build them in order.

Open questions

#	Question	Blocks	Owner
1	Auto-resolve, tactical, or real-time?	Everything
2	Does Marksman have range (fire before melee closes)?	Whether Marksman is balanced or dominant
3	What counters Marksman? Recommend Cavalry at 2.0×	Roster balance, tutorial
4	Is the triangle bonus 2.0×, or another value?	All combat maths
5	Wall HP, gates, garrison strength?	Siege viability, server temperature
6	Are troop losses permanent?	Economy, war pacing
7	Does terrain affect combat?	Map design, tech