Mongol hussars are still more than good enough against skirms…against archers, yeah not so much. But in the end they don’t really need to do much else aside buy time for mangudais to do damage, which they can still do well. And even if the hussars all die, you can always pull back and regroup because mangudais have mobility, whereas skirms/archers do not. Of course, CAs can do that too: the main difference is that onagers can easily be sniped by mangudais, whereas CAs will just die if they engage. Mass onagers still works because mangudais do not have time to snipe them all, but that is a massive investment in an army with poor mobility, prone to sniping by enemy cavalry and above all mongols can just avoid fighting it in open mass.
Oh they do, SO shreds everything when massed…but good luck massing that and good luck forcing mangudais to fight you when they can just run away. What you say makes perfect sense on closed maps, like blackforest, but on more open maps, not that much.
Run away and what? if you’re taking the fight to their base, you’ll force the fight. That is the point of halb siege, to counter mobility. I also disagree with your notion of onager being a hard counter to CA, considering CA have high HP and speed, also them doing 2 damage to mangonels compared to 1 of xbows, 4 or 3 against onager/SO in imp
You aren’t considering pro play then, because for the last Hidden Cup, Mongols were the only viable pick on a hybrid water-land map called Bay (it’s Pants, T90) just on the principle of “Mangudai is broken.” And for the record, every single one of those matches was won by a Mongol who did nothing but mass Mangudai and used it as a catch-all tool to kill trebs, raid, control the map, and push.
It was so utterly dominant the map was reworked to make the one stone available to each player way further out as to make securing it a nightmare without fighting over the map. This is not speculation. They reworked the map to nerf the Mongols, as T90 specifically confirmed as the intention for making the stone so horribly forward. That’s on the Mangudai. All the OP wants (and for the first time in a bit, his suggestion is entirely reasonable and makes a ton of sense) is to take a tiny bit of damage off the trebs so that they can’t defend their castles with just pure Mangudai. Take T90’s opinion with a grain of salt, he’s just top 100 I guess.
Two bonus points of damage on the Trebs, and just trebs, is not going to stop the Mangudai from being the absolute monster it already is. It’s just going to make enemy trebs a threat to the castles that they produce out of for the first time since DE dropped.
Well the fact that Arambai got nerf though definitely everyone knows Mangudai are the better units makes me feel safe that the time will come where Mangudai also get their nerf too. But fact is, Mongols have one of the strongest late game ever with their unstoppable Mangudai, Hussar siege ram push.
They also replaced the huge deer patch each player got with a more standard four deer patch. They did not change the need to expand far for extra resources, nor did they change how your main base is unwallable, both things that favor Mongols, being a very mobile civ with a powerspike around the time people would try to have pallisade walls up.
The original map was basically a perfect storm of factors that benefit the Mongols (with the exception of the fish in the bay). If I made a map full of berries, lots of hills surrounding the player bases and random death traps that only target Monks the Franks would look pretty OP on that too.
Doesn’t really matter how many deer are in the patch. It’s so far away from the base that you really can’t have them consistently and trying so will get you in a lot of trouble.
Mongols have not been played as an aggressive “get in before the walls go up” civ on Bay, it’s purely FC castle drop to secure the base and then mass mangudai until you win. There was no alternative strategy. The meta was Mongols, and specifically mongol Mangudai. You may make the claim that the map helps the Mongols and whether or not that’s true the meta demanded the unit that we’re taking about in the thread right now.
Also, there’s more overall deer on the map than before, not less, just spread out in different clumps. This is to incentivize expansion towards controlling the belt, that’s been emphasized by T90 multiple times, so it’s far from a mongol meta thing. It’s really more of a counterbalance to water control, which is expected to still be more important (and it has been in all the mongol meta mirror wars since bay was conceived). Their exposed nature means they very rarely get used even in those mirrors, which means the point you are trying to make is bunk. T90 has complained about such actions, again, ad nauseum as he thinks it’s probably worth going for more often than it’s taken.
Ever since the introduction of Fire galleys, Mongols have been a decent pick for water with the faster feudal times. Bay doesn’t even have a lot of water, the deer patch and a the map being hard to wall with shallows allowed Mongols to be the ideal pick
none of them were FC, what are you talking about.
I’m not against a sensible nerf but the reasons for them performing well on a custom map of yesteryear tournament is a stupid reason to nerf them. Especially considering they had bad to no presence in other major tournaments, be it KotD or RBW
They aren’t going FC as you would in your arena game. They’re going up with a relatively shortened feudal age like you’d expect on most water maps, with the large majority of the games seeing almost no land military presence prior to castle age. It’s mainly water commitment to keep fish alive, then whoever loses water tends to put out some military to seize some map control before it’s pushed off by the faster castle age player, but that’s practically the limit of the feudal play on the map.
Yeah, and that’s why making it more open is something T90 has considered to be a strong, necessary nerf to the Mongols? Either you, or T90, do not understand what’s making Mongols good on Bay. Probably T90’s mistaken because he keeps calling it bay, it’s clearly Pants, idk man.
Oh man, that civ with an anti-cav unit beat the civ with the cav-heavy composition. My mind is blown and this one anecdotal example is the last word on the discussion despite hundreds of games showing the opposite effect.
You know what a “single anecdotal case” is, right?
So a water civ beat a non-water civ on a hybrid map after the map was specifically nerfed to handle Mongols doing the one thing they did that was so oppressive it stagnated the meta?
My shock is immeasurable. It’s almost like you made my point and then dropped it on it’s head.
I promise you that if I look at the bracket stage of HC’s since bay was released, I can count on one hand the number of non-Mongols matches. And then I will find Mongols win an overwhelmingly large number assuming they lose any matches which I can only recall one non-mirror, and Mongols (unsurprisingly) won it.
The Mongols pick is saved for Bay. It’s saved for Bay because it’s been the best option.
Second, if water isn’t that important then why does every single qualifier match in HC4 feature Japanese, Persians, or Italians (or a mix of these three), all civs with extremely strong dock bonuses?
Thirdly, go ahead, everyone answer this:
This hasn’t changed. Why isn’t Mongols clearly, far and away, the meta option anymore? So meta that they literally were the automatic choice until this tournament with no balance changes to the actual civ? Go ahead. I’m waiting for a satisfactory answer as to why “water isn’t that important” also “Map is more open” and “Mongols actually thrive on these sorts of maps” has turned Mongols from being meta into irrelevant. In a way that doesn’t indicate a serious problem with early Castles into Mangudai mass. The only major change was the stone being ripped out of a secure location.
Because that’s the point of the thread. Have at it. I’ll wait.