Hi, I play a few of the infantry based civillisations. I’m a bit fed up of every game I play being dominated only by counter mangonel strategies in castle age, it is getting very boring and it is not fun.
I know people will say, use cavalry, use springalds. That’s beside the point, obviously there are way to counter mangonels, my main point is that every game I get to castle, my opponent builds like 3 - 5 and I need to focus only on countering them, at the expense of countering their other units (usually knights). This is not a fun way to have to play the game.
I don’t think any unit in the game should have the ability to kill 10 - 20 enemies in a shot. They are so much more punishing than any other hard counters in the game. They are also a hard counter to all infantry and range, which is like 50% of units in the game.
My feudal army is often heavy with infantry and range (naturally) and is now all of a sudden liable to being killed in seconds, even if we both castle at approx same time and I had a strong advantage.
When I build the counters (springalds / cav), the enemy cav normally blocks my runs at the mangonels or charges down the springalds which have poor range in castle. If I send in my army to deal with the blocking knights, they all die to the mangonels. This is especially true of maps with choke points. So I have to be very careful in deploying the counters, which kills all of the momentum I had.
Then every match turns into a springald competition as I need to out springald to take out the Mangonels to attack. If I am attacked I am at a disadvantage as I need to disengage so my entire army is not mangoneled to death. Again, not fun.
My point is that they force games into very unfun strategies. They also mean the non-mangonel player cannot make half a mistake, otherwise full army is dead in a 30 second engagement. It also leads to me thinking, why ever use anything but cavalry based armies. I come up against full armies of Cav with a few archers and a lot of mangonel in almost every castle age army I face now (even against infantry type civs very often).
I think they need to be nerfed in their damage to infantry or range, as they make the game much more unfun. I even have people who just beat me with them agreeing with me.
Mangonels already do pretty mediocre damage against infantry. If your opponents are really spending thousands of resources massing that many Mangonels, it’s not absurd they would kill a lot of units. 5 mangonels is the equivalent of about 40 archers and 40 archers or 30ish crossbows would kill a bunch of melee infantry approximately as fast.
Mangos are really only useful vs archers, and just having like 1-2 springalds is enough that they aren’t allowed to be used unless they kill your springalds first as they get outranged.
If your enemy can protect their mango with units, you should be able to protect your springald (it’s smaller and longer ranged)
Allow me to say that you’re asking for it! An infantry, especially ranged, army is quite the tasty morsel for mangonels. In early Castle Age, siege can seriously change the balance and Mangonels can be the killing stone for a feudal army. At that point, it’s better to have siege than not. If your opponent is trying to win you can’t really blame him for that. You can still focus on infantry but Mangonels are something you will always have to watch your back for.
A single Mangonel doesn’t one-shot anything. 3 though do. They don’t hard counter all infantry either, just ranged infantry. Melee infantry has a weakness due to the slowness and lack of range but heavy infantry is still quite resistant to them. You have to remember to spread out your troops.
If your opponent gets to Castle Age and is able to make a Mangonel, you should be able to upgrade your units to veteran or make a Springald as well. Also, you can start countering Mangonels by having a sizeable amount of Horsemen in late Feudal. It’s a deterrent too.
Deployed Springalds deny an area to Mangonels. A couple of Springalds one-shot a Mangonel, so with the greater range you can always fire the first two shots, which can take a whole Mangonel out of the equation. If you base on infantry, you should protect the springalds until they get the job done.
At that point it comes down to tactics. You should field more cavalry. But to keep infantry oriented, you have to use another strategy. Infantry is cheaper, so you can have a number advantage. That means that you could have troops where your enemy doesn’t… I would advise to be very aggressive in late Feudal, so to shutdown every attempt to mass up Mangonels by the enemy. Or win already. Infantry is also expandable, while siege isn’t. Losing a few infantry units doesn’t hurt as much as losing a couple Mangonels, so with a decent economy behind you can easily replace the losses. Keep that wave coming!
There still are some weird behaviours with siege units, but it got better. Deploying manually at the right spot and moment is the key for reliability. But yeah the system is inherently clunky, we have to adapt to it.
MAA completely destroy mangonel. And most other melee unit. Unless they have like twice your army in resources. (Which seems to be the case in your example 4)
Mangonel are really just good against ranged. Also they are extremely expensive.
We see post like that everyday about people complaining about x or y unit.
Last time it was a post about range units being too strong, now its mangonel, guess what, mangonel kill ranged…
I don’t know which level you are or civ you play, but at platinum we only see mango when the opponent get too greedy with ranged unit mass. (which would be op without mangonels). You would rarely see mango against mass of melee like spear or maa.
Remember that you have the formation to split your units, also if you move your units right next to the mangonel, even the ranged ones, they cant shoot you. Another thing you can do is move forward 1 unit to make the mango target that one unit alone.