Why do some civs have access to MAA in Dark Age / Feudal when there is literally no counter to this unit spam? Archers? They tickle MAAs. Spears? get trashed. Knights get trashed by their spears. What are you supposed to counter it with? MAAs can tank arrows and kill villagers while rams will destroy your base.
5 Likes
Archers have 5 damage, fire once every 1.5 seconds, 5 range, and a movespeed of 1.25. MAA have 120 HP, 3 pierce armor, and a movespeed of 1.15.
In other words, micro your archers and kite them to death. MAA cost Gold and a fuckload of food to make. Anybody rushing you down with MAA is trying to all-in you but they canât outrun archers. Early barracks is also a 150 wood investment thatâs not going into an age-up and if they donât proxy you it takes a long time for the MAA to arrive. If they proxy you, scout it out better and take the vil out before he builds it.
1 archer needs 60 shots to kill an MAA. 2 archers need 30. 3 need 20. 4 need 15. 5 need 12. As long as you get a small mass out, you can kite any MAA ball to death in the early game and have the initiative for the rest of the game as they delayed castle and upgrades for a long time to try to bumrush you. If someone shows up in feudal at like 8 minutes with 16 MAA and a ram or two, you just failed at scouting and played the match blind.
5 Likes
Regarding this, it would be a great feature for the Skirmish AI, or even Art of War challenges, if some scripted game would reproduce this behaviour.
In theory, it always sounds easy to counter a rush, but in practice, in 1 out of 10 games happensâŠ, hard to exercise and learn how to. (And not all have practice buddies⊠teams, etc.)
They dont need to out-run my archers they just need to destroy my base. If they can push back my archers then I can no longer hold my base. Let villagers run away staying idle?
Yea they can add just a few horsemen and you are doomed. Unlike English not every TC is turret to defend against MAAs. They just need to destroy your base not run toward your archers. You canât make more archers if they are roaming around your base and you need minimum of 15 archers to even do any damage.
Whats scouting gonna do if you dont have a unit to counter them? What am I gonna make 69 archers? In feudal which will be pushed back? Or try to raid their base? Yea good luck trying to raid english when being pushed or try to out eco HRE when they get gather bonus. Those MAA will be at your throat in 6min if opponent is HRE. Can pretty much idle your entire eco and not every map is closed. You canâât wall choke points in open maps. Opponent doesnâ't care about MAAs dying. They can delay castle, idle villagers until get rams and big mass.
Most resources are outside your TC range. Lets suppose your gold. How are you supposed to defend it and age up even if 3 maa show up. MAA are not expensive compared to knights or horsemen. They can isolate your resource for a long time by throwing bunch of MAAs.
1 Like
Maybe a good mod idea if someone knows how to create those 
I would definitely use that.
GodâŠ
Thatâs a typical: âI just want to cry thread, and everybody who wants to change my mind is wrong.â
SouthernSage854 already gave you an explanation how it works out. You can finish a game off with MAA in Feudal, but not before the enemys eco is already so far behind, that he canât win either. If your enemy is only MAA pushing, you are the one, making something completely wrong.
My personal mindset is: âTake a look in the mirror, what could i have done better. Donât blame the game.â
If you get this in your mind, youâll get better and reach a point, where you will know how to defend this.
1 Like
I asked very simple question. what counters MAA in feudal which is resource efficient and I can defend my base with? He is explained how it works. I know that much. Your archers wont be able to hold the position. Even if it kills few MAA the opponent got what he wanted. Idling eco or isolating resource. They can keep doing and keep scaling.
Alright letâs take them one at a time.
Theyâre not going to destroy your base. Every MAA has 10 torch damage in dark age and 13 in Feudal. Itâs going to take a long, long, long time for them to destroy any of your buildings unless you allowed them to mass up to a ridiculous degree. They either have a choice of chasing your achers down and getting pelted or ignoring your archers, focusing your buildings, and getting pelted. Itâs never worth ignoring the enemy archers in a situation like that because youâre not going to kill his base fast enough, youâll get pelted to death. You need a proper deathball to do that which isnât possible unless you allow them to do it. If they pull back, chase them down to keep pelting them and taking out MAA while your own archer ball increases.
For the horsemen, this is where scouting comes in. If you see them drop stables at their proxy or at their base or wherever, drop a barracks near your TC where its safe. Pump out a few spearmen and just micro it. One spear can take out like 2 cavs and they are incredibly cheap compared to both MAA and Cavs. Both of the later need at least 100 food each while archers and spears are noticeably cheaper. And you donât need 15 archers. 4 to 5 archers will pelt down any MAA in a minute tops with focus fire, and since theyâre ranged and the MAA is not? You can keep adding archers to the ball and the time to kill will significantly decrease. It all comes down to micro. Pull your spears back, focus fire with archers, if the cav tries charging push spears forward and archers backwards. If you lose a few spears itâs still worth the trade since you take out the cav that threatens your archers and youâll get spearmen into the fight faster than they can get cav to the fight. Spears and Archers only require food and woof, both of which should be safe if you scouted properly and got enough sheep unless you got screwed over massively by the map gen with a forward wood.
MAAâs are expensive. Theyâre 100 food and 20 gold while archers are 30 food and 50 wood. Cav are also expenive. Knights even more expensive and those require an age-up. You take the fight with archers, pelt them down, not allow them to create a deathball. Take out their units and you have the tempo to push back against them. If they keep sending in units then theyâre obviously not going to be able to tech up properly either since theyâre all-ining you.
Idling villagers for a few seconds to kill an early all-in is worth it incredibly so. You lose out on a few seconds of resource gathering in the early game (which is usually sub 200 per minute) to kill units that cost 120 resources a pop.
It reads less that the MAA rush is a problem with you and more just the idea of not being 100% efficient is destroying your mental. If you kill the MAAâs without losing vils, youâve effectively won that trade unless he is able to permanently keep you off wood and food for several minutes on end which shouldnât happen if you scout properly and build a force to meet theirs.
Edit: Also I forgot to mention, both MAA and Cav take 22 seconds to build. Weâll round it down to 20 for math and add in villagers as well. Youâre looking at 300+300+150 = 750 food per minute at minute 6 to constantly pump out from one barracks and one stable while keeping up in Eco. Itâs not that possible.
3 Likes
Thereâs new art of war challenges in season 1 and I imagine thereâll be stuff like this coming in with mods sooner or later.
2 Likes
It is simple, and very common. In current meta Delhi VS HRE it is often seen.
-
English Longbowman is the direct counter. They have extra 1 damage which is crucial to shooting down MAAs
-
Feudal Knights(French/Rus). I donât think I need to explain here
-
Horseman + Archers (Delhi / Abbasid). Since these two civs have berries, they have more food income than HRE, so they can afford larger army than HRE in feudal, since HRE would soon run out of safe food. The key point is to skirmish, kite and harass them MIDWAY. Horseman and archers will deal decent damage to feudal MAA, and have speed superiority at the same time.
-
Tower (China/Mongols) MAA is slow to produce and very expensive for Feudal which would surely delay Castle Age for long. The fact that they are slower than peasants, means that they would not kill anything if you know they are coming.
Unlike Castle Age MAA, which has 6 Range Armor, Feudal MAA only has at most 4 Range Armor, which is pretty fragile against TC or tower. And they melt against any Age III units.(Knight/MAA/Crossbow)
Therefore, Scout and tower the key points and fast Castle.
4 Likes
The best counter is the Mongol unique unit Mangudai.
But it is countered by anything else that has range or horsemen.
I think players shouldnât be forced to micro that much (manually kite). Players should never be forced on too much micro. In this case, there should be an archer âkiteâ command or stance.
Micro is an inherit part of the vast, vast.majority of RTS and RTT titles. If something as simple as archer kiting in the early game is too much micro than what is adequate micro? Maneuvering siege vs springalds count as too much micro? Flanking with horsemen too much? Weaving in and out with spearmen and archers vs archers and cav? Taking vills off a resource to drop off sooner to hit a milestone for building or recruiting? Scouting the map? If you remove the skill expression in micro then what are you left with but a spreadsheet simulator for eco timings?
5 Likes
Staying in Feudal as HRE is a death sentence, currently. HRE should be working on getting to Castle. They (MAA) are too expensive, too slow to produce and too slow overall to make any significant impact (unless you leave them 100% uncontested, obviously).
As others said, ranged units can easily counter them before Castle Age.
And English Dark Age MAA make absolutely zero sense, Iâd say itâs the most misplaced unit in the game.
Again, MAA are too expensive for a Feudal Age economy. If they are coming in numbers, keep producing units because the enemy canât possibly be aging up.
1 Like
Most civs bave different options for dealing with maa.
This unit can be more problematic against chinese, abbassids or delhi since they dont have any castle age units on age2.
However these civs have different options to deal with them
Abbassids have camel archers who can even somewhat hold off castle age man at arms ans they are getting buffed.
Chinese have good deffenses, barbican and tc have handcanonslits which do a lot of damage and you can also get handcanonslits on their towers + they get IO supervision which means they can outmass the opponent and overwhelm them. Specially if they can get the repeater xbow out(even though they still get countered by maa a big mass of them can make quick work of them).
Delhi has efficient production giving the ability to spam loads of age2 units, and quite a few other perks to them, including being able to heal units while in.combat.
Also age2 maa are not so tanky against tc and tower fire.
I mostly play french. They dont have anything special except knights in feudal which are extremely expensive and opponent can make double the amount of MAA with same resources. MAA in larger number trade really well against knight mass because of number difference. Also put few spears in it which dont require making any other production building and you can completely denied knights. Now you have to go to archers which get countered by MAA. My main point is YOU NEED A UNIT TO HOLD A POSITION. Crossbows against MAA can easily hold/defend a position. Archers cannot. They need to constantly retreat. Retreat from vital resources you need to make army or age up. Also french knights can heal up but take so much time to recover so you wont be able to build good mass against MAA. Especially if there are spears you are already finished.
Depends. MAA + Spear composition is really good to repel any cav based civ and take control of relics. This is usually the play.
I have never be successful. Archers get countered by MAAs not the other way. You need yout archers to defend resources not retreat. Crossbows can eaily defend against MAA even knights.
I agree to some extend. I donât have issue with unit micro. I hate it when you have to micro buildings as well such as TC or towers. If you dont tell them they get stuck on ram or some armored unit and its really hard to micro both army and defenses.
This is exactly the problem. Going knights is trap. A micro mistake and you lost 200+ resources. I think horsemen work better in repelling pushes. But then again both knights and horsemen dont work against maa + spears. AGAIN the issue is, MAA + Spears can push back Knights + Archers. You NEED RESOURCES to make army. If they stand on your gold mine which is outside your TC range. They can throw away few units and keep scaling behind you. You cannot make more army because you can push back their composition.
Royal Knight has 190 HP, 19 damage (+29 if charge but lets just ignore charge), 3 armor, and an attack speed of 1.38. For comparison again, here is the Royal Knight vs the Feudal MAA.
190 HP vs 120 HP
3 Melee armor vs 3 melee armor
1.38 attack speed vs 1.25 attack speed
19 damage vs 8 damage
Knights beat MAA in a 1v1 full stop. Theyâre more expensive than MAA and thatâs expected. But as the French you go school of cavalry so you donât have to waste wood on a stable and can make an archery range instead for archers.
Spearmen have 90 HP if they have the hardened upgrade. 3 archers need 6 shots to kill a spearman. 4 need 5. 5 need 4. 6 need 3. Micro the Knights back and pick off their spearmen then toss the knights into the MAA. You donât even need to do the Knight + Archer vs MAA + Spear battle. Literally just send the Knights around to harass their eco and hold the spear + MAA at bay with your archers and vil micro. Your knights are going to survive a lot longer and deal a hell of a lot more damage under the TC than either his spearman or MAA are ever going to.
If youâre doing literally nothing but a-clicking your ball into their ball then, I dunno fam, itâs a bruh moment. Just post a replay (or in this case your in-game username and tell us a match to look at) of this happening if you want and we can go over it and figure out where youâre â â â â â â â up because this really isnât that difficult to deal with if you scout it out properly and know how it works and how to fight it.
By the time they are pushing into your base they already spent a ton of resources.
Get some archers to kite them, add some outposts to defend vills, and especially add some horsemen and raid your opponent base, so to divide his attention and have him on the edge for resources.
A lot of civs can add a second or a third TC, at that point some MaA alone hardly pose a threat. With such eco adding outposts and massing archers itâs not impossible.
Remember, the point is to outboom your opponent and getto castle, then you have more and better units to deal with MaA.
Outpost or 2, when garrisoned they can deal with age 2 MaA, and they cost just wood. If you are adding TCs, most likely you also have the stone for arrow slits.
I doubt that they can be on thee different resources at the same time. If you sound the bell and garrison all your vills everything they show up, then yes, but if you garrison only the vills threatened, and get them back to work as soon as he retreat, qthen you should be fine against 3 MaA.
Just have your vills bait the enemy into your TC, divide the enemy attention with some horsemen into the enemy base, so that heâll forget about eco.
What build order or strategy do you usually go for and what strategy do you use?
My main civ is also french and I am usually quite happy if i see my hre opponent going for maa/spears age2 instead of trying to go castle, this is something you almost never see top players doing, specially if they are up against the french because they will just loose.
Knights easily win a 1v2 vs maa, also with royal knights you have the mobility advantage, the charge bonus, and the healing factor which means you can choose when to take fights and when not to, its pretty easy to micro your archers to hit and run picking off the spearman while your knight kills the maa, this is why most players go for horsemen+spearman as hre and rarely even make maa. Also your eco in age2 will just outscale HRE because your vills train faster.
As french you need to take initiative. As soon as that school of cavalry is up you should be rallying that first knight to the opponentâs gold.
Also, there are some counters.
If you are english or HRE yourself you can add your own MaA supported by archers. If you are french or rus you have knights, which overpower MaA.
Chinese got zughenu, which even if not properly a counter they are actually better at deal with MaA.
Mongols have mangudai, which are better than archers and can kite MaA. Abbasid have camel archers, which pack quite a punch and can help a lot if supported by standard archers or horsemen.
Onestly, the only civ that doesnât have any help against MaA in feudal other than archers and horsemen is DelhiâŠ