Mali Has Been on Life Support

Age of Empires IV IV - Discussion
21

The idea isnt the landmark alone will address all mali issues but it would offer a different playstyle immediately, if implemented?

I never said “the only thing they need to do is this one thing and everything mali will be resolved.”

Let’s switch gears.

Mali’s worst matchup by far is against Abbasid! Why? Abbasid has a stronger and faster growing eco. Abbasid unit composition offers the exact answer to everything Mali with the camel archer and ghulam at the forefront of said solution. (Personally all cav archer units…and maybe standard knights…need a population increase).

Fast castle famriba with burgrave like production speed AND the freeborn units maybe the exact solution to Abbasid turtle boom? That’s one of the ways HRE handles Abbasid’s turtle boom. And it would be slightly stronger than HRE burgrave bc veteran maa aren’t as fast as freeborn and don’t have as high range armor. With 7 armor on freeborn you can sit under the TC and take 1 dmg per arrow; all that idle time will add up!!!

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Beasty malding per usual BUT notice the complaint. He’s saying the matchup is unfair (mali vs Abbasid). And if you rewatch th whole match you can hear him admit several times that he was trying really really hard to win!!!

23

Solution cattle ranch should be 25 or 50 wood i prefer 25,freeborn should be open by the start and Farimba Garrison should give improved version of it.

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Your idea would further cement the singular playstyle? Cow turtle boom is all the civ can do, now; with cheap ranches like you suppose would buff something they literally just nerfed.

I’m saying mali has versatility issues, aka do something other than turtle boom, i.e. feudal all in, land grab, fast castle extra.

Switch gears.

Freeborn is a great meatshield unit, but at an eco opportunity cost of 400 food per min in castle, that’s expensive. Although freeborn in concept is a malian maa, freeborn’s soft counter is heavy unit?? Which a bit counter prodoctive, bc freeborn has a bonus vs light but will have hard time NOT being a frontline unit. Its not fast enough to easily flank like cav do. With other civs maa provide a tankier front like crossbows archer shell out the DPS. while pricy posion archers offer the highest dps of any other, price for price, posion archers still do not meet the dps of crossbows vs predominantly heavy unit enemy frontline.

Another point, if you wanna play mali eco advantage and efficient unit advantage then just got mega mass sofa archers then mix in javs as the enemy switches more and more into crossbows. Which then again begs the question what are the freeborn doing? Especially at a cost of 400 food per min opportunity cost??

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Last night i rediscovered a tower rush maliain strat i use to dabble in back when malian first came out. I believe now this strat is much stronger bc of the javelin emplacements!! This means with decent micro you can defend the towers with donso sofa warriors scouts, aka cheap and mobile units.

With this type of early tower pressure you can copy a mongol like early aggression into safer boom!

Example. You cut down your first stragglers tree all 150w, but you only build the pitmine and 2 houses. You immediately go scout you enemy to see what he’s doing and to figure out a good FRONT landmark tower drop. Around the 2:30 or so mark you pull 8 to 10 vills to trek across the map to first drop a safety tower, one you can retreat to immediately if the enemy pulls everything to defend against your landmark drop. The safety tower needs to be exactly next to your build spot so you can pop in and out. This even works vs byz bc if they pop ther villager attack buff they lose their torch abilities which means they do less dmg to your safety tower.

Lets consider the innate investment necessary to pull this off. 10 villagers pull across the map with no WB means it will take about 60s to reach the front side of the enemy base, thats 60s × 10vils =600Vil-sec gather time invested. Next to slam down the landmark with 10 villagers takes 57s build time so that’s another 570Vil-sec gather time invested. For a grand total of 1170Vil-sec. This is a lot of relative resources gathering time invested! But lets contrast all this with what the enemy may have to do to deal with your towers. Standard civ 4 vil landmark build time is 95s so thats 380Vil-sec, next most civs need to build a bsm and collect resources to research siege engineering; 150w BSM and 175 res siege engineering, then a production building to make an infantry unit to build the siege and finally the cost of the multiple siege, let’s say 2. 150+ 175+150+80+400= 955 resources! And the truth is…2 rams dont protect themselves which means they need a reasonable size army to def the siege?

So on paper you can easily see for most civs it is exceptionally pricey to deal with a tower landmark drop and in most cases the enemy will be forced to just move away as that will initially be th cheaper and safer alternative to dealing with a successful tower landmark drop.

But let’s say the dude decides to NOT engage the landmark, and just moves away? Well now you need to read the situation, is there a safe opportunity for you to go back and turtle boom? Fc tech advantage and use the tower for trebs protection? Basically a successful drop doesnt need to only payoff with the enemy immediately trying to siege your landmark down. The vision alone is extremely viable as you can significantly leverage the info to consistently counterplay.

Edit
These are th civs NOT to do this strat against ever!!
English will kill you…
China buikds faster so they will counter bbq your towers
Mongols always open up aggression
Rus is a toss up since you can’t know before hand which landmark they will make, therefore bad idea vs them
Ottoman military school opener will mean they have 3 spears out by the time you would have reached their base
Ootd*, if ootd open up spears, this strat is moot, also ootd villagers are hefty so, you need exceptional execution.

This strat works amazing vs:
HRE especially if you get lucky and drop this on the woodline nearest their chapel.
Delhi, their researches take take too long initially and if you’re hampering their woodline you’re putting them in a blender.
Abbasid, if they’re going the standard 3tc eco wing, a tower om their woodline isnt something they can ignore which means 2-3tcs get a deferment.
Ayyubids, eco wing same thing as Abbasid.
Juicy will just die to this
Japan if you can also deny gold, all the units japan needs to contend with mali requires gold.

Also dont do this vs frenches not bc it wont work but bc mali std play already has an exceptionally high win rate vs frenches.

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I’m not sure these proxy builds ever really work unless you get a perfect spawn (say you can cover 2-3 of their local gold mines so they end up with nothing.)

Or at least that’s been my experience of people proxy-Barbicaning since the game launched.

The issue I think is that if you pivot to an all in on seeing it, then the Blacksmith/Siege Engineering/Rams aren’t wasted. You were going to get them anyway to go all in. By contrast the Proxying player is down a lot of resources - and whether they back that up with army, or try and boom behind it, they are relatively behind where they would have been. So barring some major micro mismatch, you quickly stomp the proxy building - then advance on their base and end the game.

The more I use Freeborn the more I like them. What they are is a unit that can’t easily be hard-countered. They’ll lose in a straight up fight to Knights/MAA, but not especially quickly (you can just run away from MAA at least) - and you can make Donso/Musofadi from your barracks so they can easily be added in as required. They mow down archers/crossbows and they don’t die under TCs. Arguably Sofa achieve the same thing - but then Sofa are hard countered by spearmen/crossbows. Sure you can go Sofa/Archer/Jav etc - Mali clearly existed before this change. But I think it can mess up your opponents preferences given how a lot of factions like massing archers/crossbows.

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Drush in general are absolutely map dependent and this is why i suggest you immediately go scout enemy base looking for that preferable spots to drop the proxy.

And exactly true that bbq rushes has existed from the start and use to be so strong that they forced tose landmarks to be 8 tiles away from main tc… but they messed up!! The center of the landmark is where the tiles are counted from but the landmark’s range attack is calculated from its edge. Which means you can perfectly fit the landmarks as close as possible to the tc and hit everything that comes out of the main tc front side… this aside.

That’s the macro game. If you see the enemy is mounting to push rams then you dont go back and boom, you have a pseudo defender advantage esp with mali repair speed.

Lets go over the investment again but this time lets approx everything to apparent resources assuming a genric 0.66 resources per sec villagers effective gathering rate.

Mali proxier:

10vil, 60s walk, 47.5s landmark build =1075×0.66=709.5 apparent resources.

Non Abbasid china ootd foe:
4vil, 95s build on landmark= 380×0.66=250 apparent resources
Bsm 150w, siege engineering 175 resources, 2 rams 400w, (not counting the military production nor military units bc this time i assume the mali proxier is matching in order to defend the landmark)=725 resources .

Total vs total the one attempting to kill the proxier has to out spend considerably!!! 709.5 vs 975

And landmarks dont go down easily, 10 villagers can pop one of those rams while both play the mini game of in an out vs the range dmg from thr landmark.

Edit i forgot to add the safety tower cost and build time. 15s build by 10vils = 150s×0.66= 99 apparent resources + 100w= 199 apparent resources for a grand total of 908.5… so it’s not too expensive for defender to defend onself…

28

Malian got a surprising feature? Or is it a bug?

You can now train mansa javelineers in the archery range starting in feudal age? This means you do not need to make the famriba at all in order to have access to this unit. However if you do unlock the mansa javelineers BEFORE you use the fambria, it locks your first fambria pick to said mansa javelineers? (Either this is the bug or having access to them without fambria is the bug)

Mansa javs are faster units than the std jav, and posion means more damage. But overall i had said in a previous post the unit over does the archer counter while not providing sufficient dps to double as a quasi-crossbow.

Today? I believe the feudal mansa javelineers might be a legit malian upgrade?? The posion damage now creates a new break point for javs vs archer units, and a few more feudal units.

This might be just what malian needed to better combat the map aggro civs like delhi and mongol? Bc feudal mansa javs new breakpoints vs ghazi raiders and keshiks improved by as much as 10 LESS shots required to kill??!

Ghazi went from 23 down to 15 jav shots to kill
Keshiks went from 29 down to 19 jav shots to kill.
Spears went from 11 down to 9
Archers went from 6 down to 5

While i believe most ppl will use these changes to turtle harder, I’m already convinced these changes will better serve malian dark/ feudal aggression!! Allow me to explain.

Donsos are the strongest spearman in game cost for cost ( head to head combat), so with the strongest spearman and improved towers that can be upgraded with just gold* , and now javelineers that can kill archers 1 hit faster? I believe malians are the new tower rushing civs and can either pivot this pressure into trade with map control or a safer cow boom!!

Start with your standard pit mine then immediately pivot into barracks tower rush. Once the enemy has sufficient archers to scare your donsos you start to rebuff them with a full mansa javs transition and keep the tower play coming with the gold javelin slits upgrades coming.

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That is obviously a bug.

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If its a Bug, please report this in the Bug Section.

There recently has been a lot of bugs related to new abilities or new technologies of many civs.

Oh, wait, it was reported 24 hours ago:

Well, if somebody got screencshoots, better.

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Mali is still on life support, nothing has been figured out. Still the singular cow boom strat.

Famriba is underwhelming. Posion javs in castle and beyond is underwhelming. Freeborn can soak range dmg but mali lacks the range dps to delete the opposing frontline, when fronts get clunky. And freeborn arent worth losing 400 food per min. If the food were not an issue than freeborn &range would be a great comp vs ottoman and would still lose to abbasid…but a bit less egregiously.

All in tower drops have mild success. Trade is too finicky and expensive to properly setup towers an mali absolutely doesnt have the ability to control the map to establish said trade from the jump. Mali in my experience and in watching others, mainly can’t stop most civs from doing their thing! Meanwhile all civs can disrupt mali from doing its thing? So you’re forced into defense boom bc its literally all you can do…and the win rates at all levels but especially the top levels tell the story.

Lastly ppl dont like playing the civ?? Singular no map control, that has a hefty setup time?? Isn’t fun for a lot of ppl!

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Aren’t poison damage archers 1 of the highest dps units in the game?

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Among archers they are #3, their dps is about 9.65 and the 2 archers above them are abbasid with 10.4 and OOtD with 16dps. This is not accounting for armor of course, and other archers like longbowman have far greater burst dps.

I guess that puts malian archers at #4 then, woops forgot that zhuge nu do a blistering 18~ dps. That’s without ranged armor though, they are nowhere near as effective vs armor compared to the other archers because of that

Compared to other ranged units all crossbows and handcannons outdps them. Poison archer upgrade is supposed to help them with heavy unit class most, seeing as they have no crossbow unit to counter heavy type with.

Another thing to consider is unique effects, HRE prelate blessing or mehter atk speed buff for example. Those things bring them within .3 dps of malian archers.

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Posion archers are the 2nd strongest dps archer in the game behind zhuge nu. Ootd doesnt count bc all their units are almost double the standard units. But if eing technical then ootd has likely the strongest of each unit type.

But zhuge nu, longbows, Abbasid composite bow archers, all have crossbows along side their dps. Meanwhile we have javelineers??? At less than half the dps of a crossbow vs heavy units.

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I’d expect that malian archers have a higher castle age dps than almost any archer as they get access to precision training for +2 damage to archers as well as the poison damage, obviously they fall off in post imp when other civs get incendiary arrows. Malian archers are still likely the best by far against units with ranged armor due to the poison damage.

Javelineers would help with countering crossbows not instead of crossbows vs armored units. For armored units you have the musofadi warrior.

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Precision is an imp tech not castle.

Also musofadi in a vaccum easily beat s standard man at arm. But the moment you mix maa plus archer vs musofadi plus jav, even with god like micro mali will lose those bouts 9 times out of 10.

Easy unit scenario you can run right now with the sharable? Unit mod.

Make 2 maa and 2 archers vs 2 javs and 2 musofadi. With no micro the archers and maa will focus fire the squishy musofadi before the musofadi can kill even 1 maa. With micro will not make much a difference, you still likely end up with 1 beaten up maa 1 archer vs 1 jav.

Now imagine this scenario with massive amounts of bodyblocking and archers sniping way more efficiently an effortlessly the musofadi front while the jav backline attempt some beasty ML splits focus fire (and still lose?) on the archer backline?

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Don’t musofadi have stealth? So you can get them into melee in most circumstances before they take any ranged fire. That’s also not really a fair fight as the musofadis are much cheaper than maa. In theory the javelins should also get a shot off first against the archers due to their range and they have enough ranged armor to win that fight easily. The musofadis can attack from stealth once the maa attempt to engage the javelins in melee.

You could also go farimba and get freeborns and pair them with musofadi warriors, get both in stealth and you should clean up. Local knowledge tech can also help with survivability of the musofadi. Late game first strike ability also provides a huge buff to them.

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niche are the time you’ll get first strike due to stealth; regardless the issue isn’t getting to the front? The issue is staying alive long enough to deal with the maa front.

also the scenario I described is exactly fair? 2 javelins cost 120 res ea take 22.5s to train; 2 maa cost 120 res ea and takes 22.5s to train. 2 musofadi cost 80 res ea and take 15s to train; 2 archers cost 80 res ea and takes 15s to train? 2 types of production facilities for both teams?

There are several things in 'theory" that are improbable in the course of a live game and mega mass of units.

freeborn could go sleath in PUP but canNOT go sleath in LIVE. Next freeborn, like I had mentioned before if they can maintain the surface area will readily get rid of range units; even zhuge nu! But once the heavy units or even HORSEMAN body blocks them; they cant easily flank and waste a lot of time getting pelted trying to re-target; and that freeborn really do poorly vs heavy; so its not like you could get away with mostly freeborn and trickle in some spear/musofadi to deal with the heavy. freeborn just canNOT compete vs heavy units.

simple math:
175 HP freeborn 9base attack MAA like attack speed; 2 of them! 250 res; 15s train time each; vs 155HP MAA 4/4 armor; 12 base attack; 120res; 22.5s train time.
the 1 MAA beats the BOTH freeborn attacking it at the same time??! AT THE SAME FREAKING TIMEE??? Now imagine what a knight does to a freeborn?

So while freeborn can withstand range dmg they can not frontline vs real frontline units and barely beat light melee units; and take a long time to dismantle said units. In my experience, if you can’t swarm, if you can’t multiple harrass raid? Freeborn have a very niche role AND it cost you 400 food per min landmark which canNOT be ignored.

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If they are really not that effective then I guess just go for sofas in that scenario as they have a bonus vs infantry and would probably cost effectively kill both maa and archers especially with their imported armor tech.

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Sofa are god tier units, no question! Especially behind a full cow boom landmark!! Period…

But… if you can’t raid effectively bc your foe is well turtled (aka eng, abbasid, hre, japan, Ottoman, etc), sofa get hard countered by the god comp, xbow, spear, maa. At that point you’re back to square one…

Now what do you transition into??? All your production are stables, cant easily tech switch, unless you think warrior scouts is the play?? Normal civs would switch from full knights into xbox archers to support their knight. But us??? We got the great archers, but that’s only killing the spears?? The maa?? Requires yet a whole other production type facility And we’d have to make a billion barracks to support the shear number of musofadi you’d need to both match the enemy maa mass, and enough knowing half of them will be dead to range damage.

Also keep in mind, full cow boom at the start of castle is high octane! But flat resource generation, so if with that peak you cant stifle the enemy, the longer the game takes the less impactful the cow boom becomes as foe 2tc or whatever eventually kicks in.

I have an idea…
Full cow boom (standard)
Full sofa production (4+ stables, also standard)
Semi tech switch into springlads?? First
Then posion archers 2nd???

Whole time keep remassing :couch_and_lamp:? If the enemy crossbow mass eventually gets too big switch off sofa into warrior scouts. This maybe a way to minimize the massive production facility tech switching otherwise necessary?