What is the best counter to 75 Elite longbow men? Just got wrecked last game by that lineup.
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Huskarls, Plume and Rattan archers will beat longbowmen with equal numbers and cost-efficiently. You can also try skirmishers with rams in front of them to force the enemy to micro more.
Heavy Cav works too, especially when fully upgraded with armor.
They are ranged units, once you close the distance their easy pickings.
Siege rams, nearly any unit behind siege rams will deal with longbows as it’s impossible to micro the longbows to shoot at the units behind the rams. This way you close the gap easily and kill the longbows. You can even some of the unique ranged units to deal with the longbows, if you’ve siege rams infront.
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Also Eagle Warriors, Woad Raiders (ish), Khmer Elite Battle Elephants, Tarkans, War Wagons, basically anything fast and/or with high pierce armor, and as has been mentioned, rams are king when it comes to distracting fire.
Solo archer armies are pretty simple to counter once you get the hang of it. Although they have less range, Siege Onagers are also great if you can get a shot off, a single blast can kill 20+ enemies if the grouping is tight.
Rams in front is great, skirms and heavy cavalry are in general a good counter.
You could avoid his main army and raid his economy everywhere where his army isn’t. Longbowmen are slow, so you can hurt him from different angles all the time while he can’t hurt you much, except maybe when his main army stays in the middle of his own base, but then you keep the initiative. Only fight his main army when he is going inside your base, then you can have defender’s advantage with castles and nearby unit production.
I think 20 Huskarls would do the trick and then all have beer together, perhaps pouring one out for the one guy who didn’t make it. Iirc they were pretty much invulnerable to arrows.
There’s always the question of: “What did you have 75 of to go against him?”
Because with all units but especially with archers and cav archers, they can become a death ball, that will just steamroll you, if you have nothing of equal size to hit him back with.
I just hate when people ask for advice and people reply with “oh, this UU will make things super easy for you”
Maybe u should consider the fact that he can’t switch civ in the middle of the game? smh
But yeah, just follow the ram advices, those are the best ones to go and u can do it with any civ.
aka just read this
Maybe rams are even too effective against ranged pierce attack units? I don’t believe, that developers initially intended rams to be used to draw enemy fire like this. Ranged pierce attack units were supposed to be countered by heavy cavalry and skirmishers. But based on this topic rams have even became the main counter.
I have heard remarks from quite high level players, that massed archers are often a bad idea, because enemy can just draw their fire with rams. Seems like too effective unintended fool-proof counter.
Perhaps making ranged pierce attack units automatically ignore rams when choosing targets would be a good idea to keep gameplay balanced?
Ram front line with Skirmisher back line is good, but countered by Trebuchets or a small cavalry army. It’s really not fun to deal with. If you have a couple of rams front line, mass heavy cavalry with trebuchet support and maybe some skirms you should be able to push into any forward castles they have and slow the production of longbows. Requires good micro of your units though.
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or u could just make some melee units to take the rams down
Yes, different things can be done, but it is a question of whether it is intended, that rams are used like that or do they break intended balance.
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I think it’s intended, since they made it so you could fit skirmishers inside, the result with merely drawing fire is weaker since the opponent can just micro (but it can be done with more skirmishers)
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poor elephant archers…
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Could you explain your logic more clearly? I didn’t quite understand it.
I think, that it is allowed to put units (skirmishers included) into rams in order to bring them closer to defensive buildings while avoiding fire from those buildings. This has nothing to do with drawing fire from ranged pierce units (usually with empty rams).
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I mean that there is not much difference in theory between putting your skirms in the rams vs letting them walking behind, the difference being that with the first option you need to micro more and can only use a limited number of soldiers per ram, while in the second case you can use more troops but the enemy can micro to avoid wasting time on the rams. It is true that one of the purpose of garrisonning units into rams is for protection from buildings, but since most buildings are much more powerful than any archer, I think the devs were entirely aware of this (and it’s not impossible the ram trick was used since AoK, since rams back then weren’t that good to attack buildings anyway)
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