That's historical. The Franks dismounted and form a shieldwall at the battle of tours. Although I don't know if it was more for defending against moorish archery or their light cavalry.I feel like a shieldwall defensive stance where they take barely any range hits but move suuuper slow could be helpful
most swords were a sidearm IRL. aoe2 has primary weapons and secondary weapons now, but it shouldn't be managed by the player like ratha, automatic choosing which to use by the computer is better for this. But it costs a lot to make different sprites for unit switching to a sword though and gameplay changes too, so we can't do that.
my point earlier was that viable castle age longswordsmen won't add anything interesting to the game, it would make the game more boring.
Give them 100 HP. The super swordsman is still limited by speed. It's hard to retreat, if you send 2 swordsmen and they meet a knight, they are dead, so split up army is big risk. It's hard to micro, it's less interesting to watch. They can't pursue an enemy. They can be massed on the way to Castle Age... well, I think archers being able to be upgraded to crossbowmen is a mistake anyway and m@a look cooler.
can you think of any new interesting way that having swordsmen be super buffed would make the gameplay better? Having a giant death ball of swordsmen isn't interesting to watch. I'd rather watch knights played.
I might be wrong about a big swarm of swordsmen being the safe way to play them if they were buffed but I imagine the super swordsman as a shitty teutonic knight