hey guys spirit of the law here obviously the new indian civilizations are the new exciting thing at
the moment but in this video i want to highlight a recent big change to an existing civilization
the saracens last thursday they received a couple of sneaky changes in the patch notes that i think
went largely unnoticed but i think are a big deal the first change is of course they lost their
madrasa castle genie tech for monks and received a new unique tech called counterweights in imperial
age which i covered before an implication of that is that zealotry which gives 20 hp to
their camels had to be bumped down to castle age allowing you to pick up that tech much earlier
than you previously could the second change was a hidden modification to the mameluke's bonus
damage that overhauls its dynamic against one of their biggest counters remember mamelukes also
benefit from zealotry so i think they came out of the last patch a little under the radar as one of
the biggest winners we're going to look into the importance of both of those changes and how they
make saracens a lot more powerful in both castle and imperial age we'll start though by looking at
their castle age camels saracens already have plus 10 hp on those as a passive bonus so we're already
starting with a leg up zealotry is maybe a little expensive relatively speaking as a castle h tech
at 500 food and 450 gold which is about half the cost of advancing to the imperial age with that
extra 20 hp on top of bloodlines you're getting a total of 150 hp compared to a fully upgraded
knight's 120. in a way it does feel like buying bloodlines a second time for around three or four
times the original cost but let's see how big of a difference it makes as one example against
castle age crossbows they still lag behind the knight because of its high pure summer taking now
30 instead of previously 24 shots that's not a game-changing improvement but a combo of camels
and crossbows is seen in 2v2s reasonably often and if you have a large mass of camels then zealotry
is an easy way to make all of them more resistant to crossbows while also being good against knights
speaking of which against knights they go from basically trading 1v1 as you typically
see from a generic camel to now having a pretty significant chunk of hp left over in that trade
remember the whole point of camels isn't that they destroy knights outright but just that they're
cheaper so even a one-for-one trade is still cost-effective after zealotry though you can see
it is a pretty one-sided trade even with equal numbers for another notable comparison pikeman
counter camels in a similar way by essentially trading one for one but with a lower cost in this
case though with zealotry added in in castle age stars and camels actually win 1v1 and this is even
with fully upgraded pikemen which is somewhat unusual to see in castle age if we do it with
unupgraded defensive pikemen then saracen camel riders actually hold up really well with almost
half their hp left that's quite notable as in fact from a total resource perspective considering how
much hp was lost there's an argument here that saracen camels are trading evenly with pikeman
one on one partly helped by the fact that camels take less bonus damage than regular cavalry
i definitely wouldn't encourage going full camels against full pikemen but you can see they're doing
much better than say a generic camel would so far it looks like saracen camels are holding up well
and can definitely benefit from early zealotry if you need a power spike for your camels and are
okay with holding off on imperial age anytime a melee unit gains more hp it's going to be a
very flexible bonus and as we've seen it helps in measurable ways against crossbows knights
and pikemen now i mentioned at the start though there were two big changes i wanted to talk about
and what we've seen so far i'd actually consider these smaller of the two the larger change i'd say
was to their unique unit the mameluke now off the top of course it benefits from the same plus 20 hp
through getting early zealotry considering they start with less hp than the camel rider it's
arguably a similar or even slightly larger benefit than what we've seen for camels that's notable of
course and helps the unit but the revolutionary change is that they no longer receive anti-archer
bonus damage that's right the mameluke has secretly been considered an archer for the last
22 years the effect of that is extra bonus damage from more sources than might immediately come to
mind everything from skirmisher units and huskarls to canon galleons and even burmese manapur cavalry
have been receiving some hefty bonuses against mameluks though that's over as of last thursday
to give a sense of how important that is against elite skirmishers in castl eage they go from
taking 7 damage previously down to now just three to me skirmishers are the really big ones affected
here and it completely reverses the relationship between those units previously it's not just that
they were being out ranged by skirmishers but even up close it didn't feel like a great engagement in
either castle or imperial given mamelukes are one of the most gold intensive non-siege land
units in the game the movement of zealotry to castle age is arguably just a temporary boost
but losing anti-archer bonus damage helps right through to post-imperial one of the big hurdles
to going mamelukes was always it was massively gold intensive but lost to two of the cheapest and
easiest to mass units that basically every sieve has at this point though it pretty clearly has the
upper hand against skirmishers with equal total resources just look at the difference and how many
units are left over after a fight with 12 of them it's the difference between losing
six mammals and losing one while taking out 28 enemy units i think that's a pretty big deal
so that's the new and improved saracens and whether it's camels or especially mamelukes
i'd argue it was a big patch for them i wouldn't be surprised to see some experimentation with
castle age mamelukes as a response and some sort of uptick in the saracens play rate while they've
always been a bit underwhelming in 1v1 games they were already comfortably a top team civ
on open map team games within the ranked ladder statistically and i think these changes just make
them even better in an anti-cavalry role that'll do it for this one though and of course these are
just my thoughts on what the change means thanks for watching guys and i'll see you next time