I think you should get completely wiped without many knight losses in this situation. Effectively you have 3520 ressources worth of counter units (spears and hc) and 4000 ressources worth of units which get countered by knights (tower elephants). Elephants also deal very little damage for their cost. You even lack many upgrades. He has 12000 ressources in probably fully upgraded knights.
In your pictures you can also observe that the knights focused down your spears first while your own units spread their damage. So you have a much worse army and it’s poorly controlled.
If you want better results build more spears and focus on upgrading them. You have more than enough ressources to add more troops. Elephants are not great in team games.
Also the specific game in question out of the way and expanding to other maps. Many maps are choke focused. Beyond pikemen not being a valid counter to knights which can simply run away. Once a civ gets to castle the ability to engage with an army of longbow and pike drops to zero the moment your opponent gets a mango out. The same can not be said about knights. The problem goes beyond just villager harass in Feudal.
Just as I stated, the main goal of French is killing your vills, if you can keep your vills alive it can already a way to success.
You don’t need spears to chase the Knights, it is just impossible, unless he mis-micro.
You need spears to make his Knights useless, if he can’t kill your vills, they are useless.
The only way to eliminate the Knight is to group up an army, ram pushing his base, forcing his Knights to engage your Spears, you are ensure you are exerting pressure back to the French, force him to play defensive.
Which in all cases they can a tower pretty much puts a stop to english harass with one army in the tower.
No, a single tower cannot stop Longbows, move your guys in position you can shoot without getting shot, they are Longbows, not normal archers
meaning I can’t rush castle at all
English don’t do that
While also I think the choice of french to go archer knight is a bad combo vs pike longbow…still allow for French to back into castle age
That’s what the Pro do, if you force the pressure well, you should not facing any MAA
Actually the best way to learn how to counter the French as English, play French.
Then you will know their weakness then how to pinpoint it.
Again the game in question I had zero opportunity to do anything to the french player. I aged before him, had units covering every point he decided to atk and still took villager loses without killing a single knight. Not to mention I had all of my atk and def upgrades and died to a ram rush that I watched and had ample time to react to.
I wasn’t able to put pressure on gold. I wasn’t able to put pressure on the french player and I was constantly losing vills to knight atks. Every game I’ve played vs French has gone this way.
Again not getting into the larger problem of battling in Castle age to a French player that has a mango out. Or Imperial when the French player has the better cannon out.
In no age is the English player able to really put up any sort of real atk in my experience playing the game.
And again one tower vs longbows on most maps does stop longbow harass.
The one map with two mountain ranges and gold in the middle. Two towers at the one side of a persons base stops longbows from being able to run anywhere near a resource line. Not to mention in most cases on most maps players wall off before you can even get to the resource line.
Open maps make it harder to wall off and the ability to run around a base however there are not many maps that allow for this.
just getting around to playing around with them now after finishing my english mastery. if anything the french seem sort of weak to me. i even tried massing elite knights with spearmen and arbalests and cannons (seemed like a pretty well balanced army) and my army was just getting steamrolled by the hard AI (those multi barrelled cannons, ribauldequin or whatever were absolutely shredding my men, any thoughts on those being a bit op?) im sure ill get better with them but their late imperial units felt kind of under powered
In all honesty, that’s just you being inexperienced with the game. Ribaulequins are considered one of, if not the, worst units in the game. And if you’re unable to beat the hard AI, that’s just more you needing more practice rather than anything about civ balance. Before today’s patch, France’s winrate was middle of the pack - not super strong, but also not weak. We’ll see how the meta develops after this patch.
maybe so, but like i said i finished the english mastery and that required me to beat the hardest AI, my point was the french seemed weaker than the english, at least from what I was experiencing
Different civs require different macro, and perhaps you were too used to english macro and messed up your french macro. I don’t know how you play, but just as an example, English, being focused on longbows, require lots of wood. France, being focused on knights, require lots of gold. So if you’re playing France and you’re used to English, you often end up putting too many vills on wood instead of gold. Again, not saying that’s how you specifically play, but it does show how mistakes can cause one civ to feel weaker than another civ when you just need more practice with that civ.
For example, ribauldaquins are horrendously fragile to cannons and springalds shooting them from afar. When you were engaging, were your cannons targeting the enemy ribaulaquins? or did you just have them set to amove and shoot at whatever was closest. Targeting siege is one of the basic micro things you should learn in this game. I can see how ribauldaqins might feel op if you aren’t shooting them with your cannons.
French elite royal knights, too, are one of the strongest imperial non-siege units in the game. They are uber population efficientt, which means that if both armies are maxed out, even if the opponent is maxed out on spearmen, the knights will in fact beat the spearmen. But that requires you to have good enough macro to max out in a reasonable amount of time.
that all sounds legit, ill definitely keep practicing with them, i like their landmarks, unique techs and units a lot so in theory i should be having a blast with them. any particular army composition you recommend?
No idea what you are talking about. Nor the statistics do.
Look at the stats, french is a mediocre civs at best. I won over half my games with English vs French.
I suggest you learn how to defend knight pressure, or prevent it altogether. Its not as hard as you might think.
Sorry to ask, but what is your ELO? It may have something to do with it. In lower ELOs french are “stronger” as simple-game plan such as “make knights” prevails.
I suggest you start making walls and barracks earlier, as you go to the feudal age that should be your focus.
Walls will prevent them harassing your eco from the flanks, spearman will hold the breach. That can be done before French send their first knight. good luck
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Yea I agree french is very vulnerable in Age 2. I play french a lot and your goal is to pin opponent as long as you can, but if opponent reach your base with Archer + Spears combo it becomes close to impossible to defend. Knights are expensive so you won’t be able to mass that many archers to counter them. You don’t have access to MAA to burn down rams safely. Knights can do raiding but pretty much useless against any infantry combination with spears mixed in. Also Archer + Knights combo is extremely micro intensive. Only bot can micro this combination.
You there is a bug for my game. I’ve beat hard AI multiple times trying to unlock the English mastery and I never get the accomplishment. Even so far as to do it on the hardest AI and nothing. I eventually gave up and stopped achievements at this point. Playing vs AI 5 games and not getting the achievement is incredibly annoying.
definitely a bug worth reporting to the devs i should think, i had a similar thing happen with two of the campaigns and im hoping it can be fixed. id really rather not have to replay them but i definitely finished them all
I here a lot of people saying this about French vs English however I never see a game of it. If someone has an example of a French vs English match up where they do what they’re talking about that would be highly valuable for learning. In my experience French overwhelms me in Feudal EVERY time and end up with a stronger castle and imperial army.
I think it has something to do with the gamelenght. Happened to me a few times, when i just ramrushed the AI.
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I‘m going to play the english a bit more often, i‘ll write to you on discord, if i get a match vs. French. Or i‘ll just go for a showmatch with my best friend, who mained french before i did. We‘re around the same skilllevel.
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This match up seems to be my weakness. The mass knight army in Imperial destroys my army and even leading up to it in earlier ages the raiding gets super annoying.
I had a few matches that I was able to win.
The Mango Knight combo really destroys me. Mainly French are able to push me at any point in the game and I can only safely do it in Feudal if I happen to get a favorable gold spawn and can aggressively atk it super early. After that its a battle to just stay ahead in ages and a slow push late game. Without keep support in most battles my armies die very easy, unless I have a massive lead anyways due to a player getting over greedy which French don’t seem to do by default.