French vs ayyubids, a terrible match up for french

Age of Empires IV IV - Discussion
1

i would like to discuss about that match up with the community.

as many of you knows, this match up is a very hard match up for th french, as im typing this, it as a 43% chance to win a game, wich is the worst win rate amonst all match ups.

So why is it hard for french to deal with ayyubids?

  • their dervishes can block damage at the same time as healing villagers on gold or berries, as well as healing desert raiders.
  • desert raiders have a debuff against cavalry units and a switch weapon ability with no cooldown when switching weapons
  • a very fast castle with a very good timing push with camel lancers

what the french can do to counter this

  • mass horsemen (2 horsemen can kill a desert raider cost efficient) to counter desert raiders
  • mass archers to snipe his dervishes as well counter the desert raiders
  • all in the ayyubid base

in pratice, its much harder to deal than in theory.

i would like to hear the age of empires 4 community about this match up, is it a problem that people struggle with too? does people find it balanced to play against desert raiders into fast castle? and what would people would suggest to make this more balanced and fair to play.

some balancing changes i would like to see;

desert raider:

  • add a 15 seconds cooldown when switching weapons
  • reduce his melee armor from 5 to 3
  • and/ or change his cost price to 90f 50w 60G
  • reduce movement speed from 1.62 to 1.56
  • make them more weak against archers by adding a damage bonus( like jannisaries?)

Dervish

  • reduce movement speed from 1.62 to 1.56
  • if the dervish wing is selected, remove their ability to heal while moving. if dervish wing is selected at age3, give them the ability to heal while moving

of course i dont want every nerf to be added, but i want to see if you guys have better suggestions

ayyubids has 8 wing to choose, so many strategies to do, but they often do dervish into age 2 desert raider into fast castle. my point is to make them vary their strategies as well as making the match up more balanced with french

what do you think about this? do you have suggestions? ideas?

2

According to your demands, it would make more sense to remove the Ayyubids from the game entirely. The ones that actually need to be nerfed are the French Knights in the Feudal Age.

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well, according to your interpretation, it would make more sense to remove french from the game, since this civ is all about their knights raids.

lets go further, lets remove ayyubids and french, they will be no more problems..

how about suggest something more constructive than that? maybe the problem is the french over reliance of their knights

what i want is enough tools for the french to play in a more equal way/ fair against this MM without making ayyubids not worth playing

i have listed a list of change the devs could make, they dont have to do everything, they can take some of the changes. i do not intent to make all theses nerfs to come trough, only some or better suggestions that players can bring up. but what i want before everything, is the community to discuss about it. is there rooms for improvements or not? how can we make this more balanced? do players have better suggestions for this match up? how players deal with this? etc

4

Having French Knights dive under a Town Center in the Feudal Age should be a gamble. Except it isn’t, because Feudal spearmen can’t actually stop them in any meaningful way.

Apparently, what you want is for nothing to be able to stop French Knights. I should be able to raid wherever I want, whenever I want, while my opponent is forced to sit there and play defense. But God forbid I ever have to play defense myself, right? What a ridiculous concept.

Just make 10–15 French Knights, put another 10–15 Archers behind them, and congratulations — you’ve basically mastered the entire French civilization. You can win the game with that alone.

And before someone brings up Ayyubid Desert Raiders: yes, they have an actual disadvantage. They don’t have ranged armor.

So what exactly is the disadvantage of French Knights in the Feudal Age?

Pikeman?

HAHAHAHA. Very funny.

Apparently, you need at least 25–30 Spearmen just to kill 10 French Knights, assuming they’re fully blacksmith-upgraded, of course.

Yeah, sounds perfectly balanced to me. What a joke.

5

Its a 50-50 matchup maybe slightly in favor of Ayyubids once French learns how to play properly, see Conq+ winrates for reference.

I’ve played both sides of this matchup a few times and won more often as a French player.

And even at 43,9% its far from the worst “of all matchups” lol. Ever checked China’s matchup winrates for example?

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There is some good commentary on the match up here (pro game on YT). I like that a civ has a counter to early French healing. Yeah they are annoying but the Dervish unit just looks cute.

You need two knights, maybe three, to outdamage the healing of dervishes once the knights’ charge damage bonus runs out