I did a lot of only MAA+rams+spear pushes as HRE recently.
Essentially, MAA pushes require a lot of resources to be devoted to it. It’s literally an all in at 120 resources per unit.
Ironically, archers with +1 damage actually do fairly well vs it. You can nearly infinitely kite the MAA and keep picking them off 1 at a time, while leading them away from your base if they are chasing the archers. The key is if they devote it entirely to MAA using a 8 stack prelate group, they have enough gold to supply many racks. on water maps, they can normally keep this going without interruption up to about 5-6 racks easily, such as black forest or nagari.
on land only maps, sustaining it proves to be challenging if your opponent is active on the map. I continuously had food troubles without hunting a boar or deer, and as such needed to slow down production accordingly.
I had a lot of trouble with a regular archer player who forced me to my side of the map, and I found that I couldn’t push out without them killing the spears, or using the kiting to catch the maa.
For the french, the knight archer combo directly counters the MAA spears combo, since the MAA+spears get caught by the archer kiting, and the knights can charge and retreat safely. This should work for the rus as well, to a lesser extent. Horsemen also do a little charge, so horsemen archers could do some level of this counter as well.
I think a big part of this is not letting them go across the map without harassment from regular archers, and if you’re english, not stopping longbow production or forgetting your +1 damage.
The improvements I want to add to the build is going 3 racks 1 stable, or 3 racks 1 range, and using the horsemen to counteract the archers solely as an anti-kiting squad, essentially body blocking them, or using the 10% faster archers as a kite punishment squad.
Again, foods the hard thing to come by, so this works well on safe water maps, or maps like mongolian heights with a lot of sheep, but is a bit harder on maps like arabia, lipany, and hill n dale.