First thing you need to understand that to use Knights in a game effectively doesn’t require to learn to handle them. You make Knights, you go raid. You boom behind to make more Knights later.
Knights are a gold intensive unit. But that doesn’t really matter cause when you play them you should win before your Gold actually runs out. When your Gold runs out it’s not you being not frugal enough with your ressources. It’s the opponent that was griefing. Or the overpowered Halb spam that has “no counter”. Or the broken Xbow and Arb powerspikes. It’s very important to icorporate this thinking pattern. You are the best and Knights are the worst unit only you with your superpowerskills can make work. And as you are the best no other human being should be able to defeat you with any other unit type. If that happens, the devs have secretly nerfed the Knight line and you need to blame tham for this cheeky move, demanding to in return nerf everything that beat you with your Knights.
Don’t trust any stats that show the dominance of Knights in the current meta. They are all made up. In the current state of statistics this means ALL stat pages are totally lying and only try to undermine your Knight skills. Best thing atm is to pretend there would be no stats at all so devs don’t come to the stupid idea to look them up. And when stats are showing up there’s a simple pattern to dismiss them all:
A) Stats under pro level don’t matter and Knights /AS I TELL YOU) Fall of at higher elo. You don’t need to proof that, caus a) everybody believes that already and b) there are basically no stats with high enough numbers to deny that claim. Which also leads to
B) Once stats from higher elos are brought that show similar patterns, just point out the small sample size and therefore high margin of error.
With these simple two moves you can dismiss every single statistic that shows any kind of Knight dominance.And even better, you still reinforce the already established narrative that archers would be broken on pro level. Doesn’t matter if that’s true or not, it’s only important people believe that.
Then it’s very important to always complain in public places when you lose with Knights against other units. Or when pros lose with Knights against other units. We live in an age of attention economics, which means it doesn’t count what actually really happens, but what is perceived to happen. So whenever you see a XBow mass cleaning up Knights that aren’t microed well, don’t even try to get a good surround you make a clip, post it on reddit and complain about how broken XBows are and that shouldn’t happen. If you want to go a step further you can make clips of mangonels flattening xbow masses and comment how satisfying this is to see. To make sure devs will never touch this interaction as they need to feat the rage of all the badaboom lovers out there. But at the same time it’s important to make clear that this kind of interaction with another unit type can NEVER be applied to Knights. When Arambai are too good Knight eaters they need to be nerfed to the ground. When Coustillier charge is high enough to bust through Knight formatopns that need to be nerfed, same is also for urumi and gurjara and hindustani Camels. It’s very important to point out, that’s always the Knights which are the measure here and no other unit is allowed to just decimate them like mangonels do with xbows. When this comparison emerges point out that reducing this Kind of badaboom effect would reduce the skill required to make archers work. And in a way that’s very clear that you only demand skill from the players who don’t use Knights and not from the players who use Knights. Knights have to always work with basically no skill involved. But to make Archers work you need Liereyy-like skills. And that’s also very important to always only refer to the skills of the very best players when talking about other units than Knights and tha only they are the measure whilst Knights have to work against that with just patroling in. Meaning you inherently apply that a 1k elo player with Knights has to beat Liereyy microing xbows. Every time. This blatant discrepancy of requirement in Skill will make every person trying to discuss that with you speechless. They will just be completely out of words, as it is so obliviously bigoted. Ofc they could try to point that out, but then you can just simply counter them by complaining about making it personal. Once you did this it will become personal anyways as the accusation of making it personal is a personal accusation. Once the discussion has become personal it’s easy to completely dismiss everything said in there as it became toxic. And nobody wants to read toxic stuff.
Now we get to some more sophisticated methods, especially designed for content creators. Here it is very important to always have the underlying baseline of the high stance of Knights. Cause it’s important to collect as much of supporters behind you. So you must very early on make clear that Knights are the default best choice for all players that aren’t already pros. This again also supports the narrative that they would fall of on pro level. But it’s very important to supplement that inherently with all kind of comparisons. One exmple how this is done is in the latest video of Survivalist:
At that timestamp he shows that Knights actually need the least upgrade investment to be viable. And the whole video is to about 80 % only about upgrade costs. Implying that the Knights are actually by far the best choice to take from that perspective as you can deal a lot of economic damage with very little commitment and initiial investment. So the viewer looking for his best options will naturally chose the Knight as his favorite.
But then it’s important when it comes to the comclusion to NEVER demand any changes to Knights. First of all you don’t want to demand nerfs to a unit you just indirectly recommendet to your viewers. You see, they watch your videos to get tips for more easy wins. If you first tell them “this is the best option for you” but then demand nerfs for exactly that unit, they will be angry with you. They want to leave the video with the feeling that you provided something useful for them to more easily win games. Secondly, you don’t want to case the precident that Knights can actually be touched at all. Cause once there is that precident of a direct Knight change it would remove the status of “untouchables” from that unit, opening the potential path for future nerfs. That’s what need to be avoidet at all cost. No, instead and to satisfy your viewers you always need to come to the conclusion to nerf the second best options after the Knights, the unit that comes the closest to challenging their dominance. The “Antagonist” everybody wants to see to lose. Yes all other unit types are only there to be seen to lose against Knights. So whenever there emerges some kind of narrative where these units are “too strong” you have to amplify and punch into that narrative with unrelenting force. Like when the evil xbow and arbalest timings become too “strong”. But always point out that’s only applying to other units. When Knights win with the better Castle Age timing it’s no issue at all and it’s exaclty how it’s “supposed” to be. But very importantly, when you propose changes make it exaclty like Survivalist did here:
First make a strawman buff to the stuff your video is officially supposed to be about. Buffs that basically never see use cause they apply to stuff nobody really cares about anyway, cause it’s just apllying to “pickups” when the game is actually already over.
Then make a general change that slightly changes one of the interactions you talked about earlier. But in a way it also affects Knights in a positive way. Like when you reduce the repair speed of the first villager to 375 that means that now two Knights can outperform a single repair villager. Removing one of the last few strategical weaknesses of Knights, that they can’t just bust through buildings cause repairers still were able to keep them out. Guess what: NOT ANYMORE! Knights should be able for that now! Don’t even speak about the option to make Infnatry just have more damage output against Buildings or be able to throw torches like in AOEIV, that’s not for our game. Not when something needs to be changed about the interaction with buildings, Knights need to profit aswell. With this you show your viewers that not only you give them good advise, you even manage to somehow argue in favor of making that good advise even stronger, by reducing one of the few remaining weaknesses of that.
But then comes the most important part. And this is to demand massive nerfs for the main Antagonist, the 2nd best choice in the Archer line. Deman changes to it that require to spend 350 more ressources to make Xbows the same functionality as they currently have. More upgrades worth about 2 1/2 Knigths almost as much as it would need to make a minor raiding party of 3. Caus you know only one thing welds together more than common interests: Common enemies! Yes right! The XBows are THE ENEMY! And need to be fought relentlessly. That’s how you secure the support from your viewers. Cause when they see you are fighting their chosen enemy (the 2nd best choice), they now you mean good to them.
Don’t fear they might abandon you because you gave some superficial strawman buffs to the militia line. They understood what you tried to tell them earlier. Militia are way to expensive in intial investment and they don’t even provide good value later, cause they are just too slow to chase your fleeing vills. And then still die to TC fire as they always did. Your viewers know that you somehow needed to wrap the new xbow nerf into something different, as xbows just got nerfed and there was actaully no indication whatsoever for xbows showing off too strong. And you viewers will be amazed how you wrapped this into the coverage of a buff to the militia line, which, as you explained to them, is still (AND HALLELUJA!!!) completely useless and none of you changes would actually lead to making them useful in the midgame.
But the most important thing, for all players on the ladder. NEVER IMPROVE YOUR KNIGHT SKILLS.
It’s jut not worth it. You see, when you actually get better this would refelct in the statistics. Meaning there would be clear indication that Knights are strong. Resulting in potential nerfs to Knights and you losing more games with them. Instead you need to manipulate the perception of the community and the devs that a) Knights are supposed to work like they do and b) they would have worked better in the past and other units would have become too strong because of random things like “bad pathing”, “market abuse”, “timings”, “less lag”, “better micro” and so on. Notably it’s very important tha Knights are always falling of and other units “become dominating” which requires the devs to intervene and make Knights “viable again”. This is how you win with Knights. Don’t even try to bother about getting better in the game. The game has to become better for Knights, your unit of choice!