This IMO, has been a long standing issue. There is no proper counter unit to feudal man at arms and the worse offenders of feudal man at arms is OoTD, their massive eco advantage dumped into a strong unit that has no direct counters in feudal (unless you’re a knight civ or mali).
For example when Ootd can flood your base with 5-6 MAA under 8mins??? what are you supposed to do to counter this if you don’t have knights, maa yourself or musofadi?? Idle your whole eco with stone towers and get further and further behind economically?? Attempt to make 2 million archers and spend the rest of the game attempting to kite, still idle your eco and hope they never add horseman to the mix??
While OOTD is the biggest offender, the other MAA civs, HREs more the English, are all still a problem in this area.
Either give all civs adequate equivalent counters or significantly diminish something about these units in feudal.
Man at Arms and early knights because french player with knight can dive in to my towncenter kill a villager and escape without dying their ranged armor needs to be lowered at early game.Man at arms both need to be lowered ranged and melee armor.
China/Zhu xi
→ TC/Outpost have gunpowder slit which can hold until castle. Build a few outpost with gunpowder slit. China also has BBQ and Zhu xi has palace guard.
Ottoman
→ Sipahi, archer with +2 melee from ether.
I must admit that Ottoman vs Ootd may be the only matchup without counter because OOTD attack is so high that the +2 melee from mether is probably not enough.
Although now they just added horse archer to ottoman, i don’t know if you have time to get 2 points before they swarm your base and how effective horse archer are. You can always fast castle.
You can keep telling youself this, but that doesn’t make it true?
Feudal maa has 120hp 3/3 armor vs archer’s 5 range attack on 1.625? Attack speed. This means it takes 60 shots to kill 1 maa. And if you allow the maa to gain +1 armor before you can get +1 pierce dmg then that ballons to 120 shots to kill 1 maa.
Now consider the Ootd maa before their 30% hp damage reduction tech. 230 hp 3/3 armor vs archers? 115 shots or 230 shots if you allow them +1 armor before your +1 peirce dmg.
This allows Maa in feudal to sit under your defensive structures, impervious to incoming damage. And the longer your villagers are not gathering the bigger the eco advantage gets for them.
Lets consider the standard capital TC fully garrisoned vs an OOTD MAA.
Tc has a base 8 dmg attack on 1.12s attack speed and 6 dmg per garrison slot on a 1.88s attack speed? To make the math simple well convert this into an adjust dps= (8-3)/1.12 + [15(6-3)]/1.88 =28.4 range dmg per second. Then you take 230hp divide it by said DPS and get about 8 seconds to kill just 1 Ootd maa with a fully garrisoned TC. IF you value the average villager effective gathering rate at 0.66 resources per sec then 8s of 15 villagers idle net you a loss of 79 resources you could not gather. If the 79 resources also happens to be realized in your ability to gather food you’ll potentially lose even more from the an inability to continuously produce villagers.
Now this analysis was 1 OOTD maa vs a fully capital TC, now what about 7 of them at 8mins under your TC?
OR 5 of them with horseman and spearman to support?
Ghazi do not counter ootd maa. Especially since fights do not occur in a 1v1 unit vacuum. You’ll have mostly maa to deal with but mixed with spears and horseman.
But even in said vacuum 2 ghazi at the same time fight 1 ootd maa will both lose and the maa have +50hp remaining. That’s 280 resources lost vs 240 resources and That’s 50s of single production training time vs 27s.
Ok so already the post would have been a bit more accurate if it started by saying that the issue is only with Delhi or Ottoman.
I’m guessing you play mostly delhi rush sacred site and never any other strategy?
With Delhi vs OOTD matchup, I would suggest to rush castle. If they go relics you will be able to deny relics, if they rush MAA, then you have crossbows.
That’s one of the few matchup where playing feudal agression isn’t a good idea i think.
Ottoman - OOTD or Delhi OOTD are pretty much the only two matchup.
Against OOTD you can even make religious units faster as they will need to wait castle to build monks,
My post was very accurate from the start? If you dont haven’t knights, maa, or musofadi warriors? You cant counter feudal maa, esp Ootd maa? None of that has to be rephrased??
But notice what you just did? You went from “everyone can counter maa ezzz” to “okay maybe Ottoman delhi might have a problem?”. Also you “ghazi counter maa” to “maybe you should try to fc to get a proper counter unit vs the feudal isssue?”
You invalidated yourself. The mere suggestion of FC means you accept there isnt sufficient FEUDAL answers to the problem?
Lastly you cant FC effectively vs a rush with Ottoman and delhi, especially if your gold is in front of your base. Rush naturally beats FC, then they’ll follow you up, deny you relics bc they already have units on the map and keep the pressure steadily until you run out of in base resources.
Only civs that can FC and immediately or very quickly get a CASTLE age perk can FC against the maa rush.
English have longbow that will shred the feudal MAA.
Abbasyd and ayyubid can use camels.
China has gunpowerder splits in outpost, and BBQ.
Even ottoman and dehli don’t have much issue against japan or HRE as the +2 melee armor, or bonus damage vs heavy is good enough for small scale army, and you have time to go castle in mean time.
So the only matchup that is “maybe” problematic is delhi or ottoman against OOTD.
Rush dont naturally beat fast castle. I have countered OOTD maa rush many times with Japan with Fast castle without making any samourai. Remember that ootd MAA cost 240 resources. + the cost for barracks + time to produce them + time to reach your base. Thats like only 5 they can make if you go castle, maybe 2-3 reach your base before castle. Your TC with 1-2 tower will beat the first few.
It’s been said earlier, but reducing hp and/or reducing ranged armor would be enough. You could reduce the ranged armor by 1 and it would be a tremendous difference. Increased armor in castle age is far less impactful when every civ gets an anti armor unit at that point.
I counter this in the current meta with masses of archers, as others have suggested, but the cost ratio is a bit insane. 20 archers to 3 shot 1 man at arms is 1600 resources to counter 120 resources. Yes, it works (somewhat) in the current meta, but it could be tweaked to be more in the favor of archers (in feudal only of course).
tells us you don’t play the game without telling us you don’t play the game?