As the title says, men at arms and handcannoners are better than spearmen and handcannoner versus knights, change my mind.
The onus is on you. Not the other way around mate
I will explain a bit.
Whereas spearmen+handcannoner ideally is better vs cavalry, spearmen are so weak against everything that is not cavalry. This means you will lose them easy to archers, towers with garrison, keeps, handcannoners, men at arms, etc… And in the moment you lose them, or their numbers are low, then you will lose the handcannoners.
Men at arms, do less damage versus knights than spearmen, but their role here is not do damage, is tank everything that comes. They cant protect as spearmen from charges, but they can just stand in the middle and get the damage, whereas handcannoner deal with them.
In other situations, where there are no knights, men at arms performs better than spearmen.
The only scenary where spearmen can act better than men at arms, is protecting siege, due to it’s low mobility. Nevertheless, handcannoner has enough mobility to mix in middle of men at arms while they absorb the damage and then attack with handcannoner to kill the knights.
Despite men at arms are more expensive than spearmen, for some civs they are near free, for example for english, so you can be always spamming men at arms to refill the casualties, and the handcannoner kills everything.
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But dont men at arms move slow? Cant archers murder them pretty easily?
I love this combo, as it allows me to save up wood for siege.
They move slow, but archers has nothing to do against men at arms.
Yep, this composition saves the wood, and lets you build siege.
Also, I mix 20 horsemen to kill enemy archers/siege.
What about Maa and crossbow tho
Using horsemen as a frontline gives you a reasonably tanky and much more mobile meat wall that lets you save more gold for more HCs. Also they better than maa against archers/xbows/mangonels.
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I think MAA for this purpose is better, but I’d never tried horsemen instead, I will try it.
Problem with this composition is that xbows are only effective against armored, and not as much as handcannoner, so against mali army this would be not effective.
Also, handcannoner is multipurpose unit, is good against everything, it’s out of th rock-paper-scissor system the game proposes.
I mean, perhaps your post should say: “better vs knights and archers”, since you make that clarification below. Which is true. But it’s worse vs XBow + knight or XBow + Horseman. That’s the RPS aspect of the game.
Nope, I said vs knights. Full knights comp.
I’m tired of see people go full knights.