Is it just me or does the Zhuge Nu rush from Zhu Xi’s Legacy need to be nerfed?
I have no idea how to beat it. I’m a Mongol main, and I swear I had 80 plus Zhuge Nu units raiding my base at the 10 to 12 minute mark the other day.
How do you even counter it? Doesn’t this need to be nerfed? I’m at a loss on how to deal with it.
Love to hear your thoughts or ideas.
Yeah agree, it’s not easy but this is where scouting is important. If you see he’s massing that many, should be able to match similar numbers in archers. Correct me if I’m wrong but Mongol archers are cheaper than chu ko nus? Plus a handful of keshiks for frontline. I also make sure i get my ranged armour upgrade as soon as i see chu ko ### ### as it significantly reduces damage taken
Are they attacked your base after 10 mins? At that time, Zhuge Nu could only be clown when facing MAAs and Mangonels.
What’s really difficult to deal was their attacked from about 5 or 6 mins.
Try scouting better, Zhuge Nu are slow and short range units, they can’t deal palisade wall and tower. They can’t kill your villagers in distance like longbows.
And you can attack their reinforcement queue by Keshik, to prevent your enemy rally a large troop.
Your biggest threat is actually Imperial Officials who can accelerate training speed, but not Zhuge Nu units themself. If Zhuge Nu units were not in a large of group, they were no need to be worried.
So archers will counter them? I have not tried that.
I’ll give it a go.
I’d assumed that my only option was keshiks, but couldn’t get anywhere near enough in such a short time.
And okay, I’ll try scouting more too, and yeah I typically go for ranged armour to try to counter them.
But the other part of my question, do you think Zhu Xi’s legacy is OP? Or is it just me?
They definitely started attacking earlier than that. But by the time we got to hat time in the game there were more than 80 of them in my base and I had no hope. Lol
So they start the attack early, age up to feudal super early, and then they’re in my base super early.
Attacking reinforcements sounds like a good idea. I’ll try that too. And I’ll try more towers too.
What can be done about he imperial officials? Try to dive them and raid them with keshiks super early?
As mongol you have keshiks, they are definitely the best counter. Any armored units.
Many civs don’t have armored units in feudal and will struggle more.
People make archer because they don’t have armored or because they make spearmen. If they don’t make spearmen the keshik should destroy them at equal resources.
Get the +1 ranged armor upgrade.
80 zhugu nu is equivalent to 32 keshik in resources.
Keshiks counter them well but it’s hard to get enough mass of them to take them down. Once they get critical mass of chu ko nu they’ll just one shot the keshiks. Id probably mix in horsemen just to save on some resources. Basically using them as meatshield while archers take them down.
Zhus legacy chu ko nu is harder to deal with as they get them out quicker than Chinese. Mongols have advantage of double production. I would probably also get multiple production buildings up asap so you can match the production of the Chinese.
When i play mongols i send 2 keshiks to raid asap, as it delays the player and distracts them and any chu ko nus they get out they’ll use them to clean up your raid rather than sending them to your base further delaying the push
Raiding IO couldn’t be a good idea, your enemy could just train another one but your assaulting force may never come back.
The reason why ZXL are threatening is the same as English. They just train faster than you, their rapid training process will start in about 4 mins. After this point, assault their reinforce could be the best way to counter.
But you still got better way, why not attack them in Dark Age? Just go Tower Rush, ZXL gotta build a barrack to deal your Rush, so they go feudal could be far more later.
I was gonna try to watch your replay to see if I could offer some advice, but unfortunately your most recent games I can find (assuming your game name is the same as your forum name) were before the patch which means I can’t watch. If it happens again give a ping and maybe I or someone else can watch and provide more specific advice.
In the abstract though, keshiks or horsemen, produced doubled up by the ovoo, are where I think I would go. Maybe with a tower on your gold if necessary. But ideally, as the Mongols I think I’d want to keep the action in my opponent’s base, rather than be on the defensive. So the speed and mobility of cavalry helps you get in and kill off zhuge nu at the source, without being able to freely get across the map to pick off your villagers in your base.
Play malians, start archery range, make some preamptive javelin throwers while scouting the enemy with your scout and trying to spot military buildings/potential ageups.
If you spot multiple archery ranges, make sure to build multiple as well and keep making javs.
If you spot a stable, build a baracks and another archery range and start trainig a few (!) donsos.
Keep spamming javs nonstop as much as you can.
Build walls around your base and infront of the pitmines, in key spots to prevent villager snipes.
Get your ranged armor upgrade as soon as you can afford it, then ranged damage.
Add a stable or 2, make sofas and try to raid as much as possible and/or catch reinforcements.
Meanwhile, try and outmicro+kite his zugs as hard as you can (preferably conq3 level kiting).
Meanwhile cowboom as much as you can afford and build a 2nd pitmine.
Keep hitting the zugs with javs and whenever they come closer, move away, just to hit them again.
Build a forward outpost or two and fortify them plus research arrowslits.
Sofas are also really good against zugenus, as they are faster than knights, cheaper than knights and have bonus damage vs infantry (including archers).
With lots of javs behind them, you should win after the early kite-wars with pure javs (and maybe some donsos for the case of horsemen all in)
Go age3 asap, upgrade your javs and sofas, add mangos, raid as much as you can, deny relics, take your own relics.
Raid raid raid raid raid.
At some point he’ll run out of food/gold and spread on the map, this is when you raid even harder.
As soon as he has to transition to farms and granary, keep raiding his farms from multiple directions.
Make sure he can not get stone-walls up, keep interrupting his villagers from building them.
Go for final push.
Well played.
(dia3 here, mostly beating that zuge rush with mostly microing their zugs with javs)
I have no clue how other civs can deal with that, as I mainly play Malian and English.
English can also do well against this, if you start making longbows early and keep trying to snipe enemy zugs.
Also, walls and outposts help a LOT with arrowslits and fortifications as soon as rams become affordable for the enemy.
Small dark age military could do some tricks. Zhu Xi want to get Meditation Ganden first to gain resourse for military or Song Dynasty later.
Use Khan to scout resource around opponent and guess best location to place the Garden (tend to out of TC defend) and put some military there. That should affect to Zhu Xi build order a bit as have to change to another landmark without good resource income to back-up.
You can tower rush but tower is static and Zhu Xi might just change location.
Thanks for the advice guys.
So it sounds like the way to go is heavier aggression. Try towers early, or early raids, and cause trouble for ZXL. And I’ll try massing huge amounts of Keshiks. Someone mentioned archers too. Would it make sense to have archers and Keshiks? I guess it depends if ZXL adds any spears.
And I’ll try keeping the fighting away from my home base.
Sounds like the problem is me. Not ZXL. Lol.
Man some of ZXL guys just age up quickly
Super quick, right? Almost too quick…
That’s why I don’t think tower rush them is the right move. You need be in feudal fast so you can start making keshik and archer.
When you are defending your base in feudal. It’s ok to send 2-3 keshik to the back of their base. If they all-in you they probably don’t have much defense in their own base.
Outpost are really good against zhugu nu rush also You should make sure to build 1 or 2 near important resource not in range of tc.
Got my first win against ZXL last night. I appreciate all the advice.
Went to Feudal ASAP, left 5 vils on wood for the whole game, the rest was food and gold. Built 2 stables early in feudal, and then raided his base, cut off reinforcements, and built up enough to assault his main raiding army. After I had a little breathing room, added 2 archery ranges and trained Mangudai to deal with the spears. Killed heaps of zhuges, and some vils, and they tapped out.
Basically, played super agressive, and it worked.
Cheers dudes!
Glad for you, but I wouldn’t train mangudai to deal with spears, archers are way better for this and cheaper, also they will work better against Zhu Ge Nu.
Mangudais main use is raiding villagers, but I don’t think they are good to combat units.
Yeah I hadn’t made them much for ages. But I’m finding them super useful lately. I like the agility and speed. I’ve been microing the Keshiks in to bait the spears out, and then take them out with the Mangudai.
Also having great luck with Mangudai against the Japanese, and Byzantines, especially their fancy spears.
It worked particularly well in that last game I won against ZXL because I was going heavy on food and gold and didn’t have many vils on wood, so didn’t have any wood to spare.
And once the opponents army is depleted a little, they’re great for killing vils like you say. I also like that you can just set waypoints around where the vils are and they go and kill stuff automatically, in the case that I’m busy with something else…
Maybe because I’m not super highly ranked, but the opponents tend to hang in their base a lot more when I do this. And then I can take map control, trade, etc.
I appreciate your advice though and I’ll give it a shot next time.
Insanely quick…
By making very few horseman, like 4 against 10 zhugenu is enough. Build 1 or 2 tower on your gold, And quickly go age3 and make maa.