I am still not excited about the Mongols, because they aren’t good at cavalry.
They don’t have anything special for their cavalry (except YAM Network) and it is now almost the worst civ at a high level.
That one thing every top players said about Mongol.
There aren’t many option outside tower rush, when tower rush got nerfed they are not good. It is one of the weakest civ to flight long age2 rather than go age3 too.
No bonus on cav when player go deer stone 95% of the time.
I agree that changes are needed to mongols.
But I disagree that they aren’t good cav.
To many people understimate how much Mobility has to say in the game.
And to many people obsess about Deerstones.
With the latest changes to Kurultai, it had made it far more attractive alternative compared to before vs the Steppe Rebout (Steppe redoubt still being insanely good)
many players still are stuck in the old mentality of Deer stones into Steppe Redoubt.
As to many mongol players have been overly reliant on tower-rushing tactic.
People forgot that going Silver tree and Kurultai is just as viable. Especially on certain maps, such as Altai or French pass as an example.
Regardless.
When it comes to Mongol cavalry, they are still strong. However, how I’ve seen many mongol players do as a Mistake is not mixing units.
I.e. They are either just going into fast-castle and then spam Lancers.
Or stick in feudal and spam Mangudai.
The mongol cavalry strength comes from having a mix of units.
I personally like to stick to an early feudal aggression, mixing mangudai and horsemen.
Raid the opponent boosting myself into castle.
In castle, I actually make all 3 cavalry units and mix them.
Core being Horsemen, supported by lancers and a small group of mangudai.
Reason for this is that Lancers and Mangudai share resources.
Lancers are weak against crossbow and expensive.
Having a core unit of Horsemen avoids the crossbow weakness, and you retain the burst damage from Lancers charge.
Having mass lancers, you end up losing most of the units charge bonus as only the front row units get the Lancer-charge hitting. The rest loses their Charge-bonus once they get haltet up by “traffic”.
Horsemen are cheap, still has plenty of range armor, and strong against Crossbows.
They don’t cost gold, so you wont be loosing gold as a trade-off.
yes Horsemen do weaker damage against melee infantry, but this is where Lanceres come into play again, covering the Horseman’s weakness, and the Horseman covering the Lancers weakness.
Only major problem being Spears.
This is where the Mangudai, and the “Unique” ness of the Mongol Cavalry comes into play. As pretty much any civ can do Knights/Lancers+Horsemen.
You don’t spam mangudai as I see so many people doing. You make them in smaller supportive groups.
Think of them more as the Khan’s bodyguard. Supplementing the Khan.
Addition to this, It adds something no other Cavalry civ can give:
Combat Manuverability.
This means, if you are engaging an opponent army. And you see spears starts coming in, or a large group of spearman, You can pull away your army. Your mangudai will always position themselves in the back.
This allows you to start “Kiting” and dwindling the spear army.
If you practice your micro a bit. You can force opponents army to split.
Throwing your mangudai and lancers one direction, and send the horsemen in the other direction. (this should be easily done enough by just telling your entire army to go 1 direction, then double click on any horsemen and tell them to go opposite direction)
This usually leads to the enemies army separating the melee/spears away from the Ranged.
Once you strike on the opponents range blob, you will most likely see the opponent react and turn his melee/Spear army to support his range units.
This is when you can start giving chase with your mangudai/horsemen army.
With the Khan added Bonus and buffs, and the aid of Kurultai, this becomes very efficient and has it strength.
If you’r army gets weakened enough, all you have to do is to do what mongols does best.
Call the Run speed signalling arrow and retreat to the Kurultai. Heal up, reinforce and go again.
In addition to this, The mongol cavalry has Improved Bloodlines wich gives them an advantage over other cavalry units of the same type.
I find Mongol being less of a Macro-intesive civilization, as Pastures and Trade econ pretty much runs itself.
And as mongol, you never really need to go into 2TC and can stick to only 1 most of the time.
This allows you to focus more in the Micro and controlling your armies instead.
Bounty upgrade is VERY UNDERRATED upgrade.
With Bounty + Torches, although both expensive upgrades. Are still well worth it. Especially if you’re in Castle Age.
Splitting off a small (around 10-15) group of Horsemen from your main army to run in the back and target all their farms.
Farms burn very quickly. And usually they tend to have 10+ farms if they hit castle age, or especially against the english.
now you do the math, if each farm burned gives you 100 Resources in total. And you burn through 10 farms.
Not only do you gain 1000 resources in total from it.
But the opponent also looses 750 Resources (English 500 resources), having to build new farms!
Which gives you a lead of 1750 Resources in total.
I found this particularly effective against english, if you send 10 horsemen and 5 mangudai into their back lines, while distracting their armies elsewhere.
Send the mangudai to their woodline and hold position.
And the Horsemen on their farms to start burning farms. (shift click is your friend)
This has the double effect of idling the English economy.
But also putting a effective temporary stop to their longbow spam later on which you can exploit.
As they have to waste all their wood econ on rebuilding all the farms.
The cost of loosing 10 horsemen for doing this is well worth it in my opinion. If you have a very good attention, you’ll be able to retreat your mangudai quite often.
If you get Improved Bounty, it makes it even more worth while! As that gives you 150 Resources. Thus loosing 15 units is easily recoverable. If you’ve been smart and gotten the stone Bounty, this allows you to double produce or get additional imp. upgrades to give you an edge.
In the end, what I guess I want to say is that.
People who play Mongols tend to forget Mongol as Mongol.
Raid, pillage and retreat.
Avoid Head-on Battles whenever possible.
Use secondary raiding army to diver the opponents attention away from the front line.
Exploit the lack of attention in their frontline to counter-push.
Exploit the lack of attention in their backline to raid their econ, boosting your own.
River’s and Bodies of water are the Mongols best friend.
Because people rely so naivly for them for protection. Just build a Dock and a transport ship, send the raiding part over and give them a total surprise, while you knock on their main gates of the river crossing with siege.
I know this is not easy to pull off, as it does require you to be able to multitask 2 separate army groups.
And some maps really limit your choices.
But I do agree that Mongols need some changes.
Their Khaganate palace is rather useless.
They should get their old Yam Speed network back with the lingering, or at least make the lingering effect a Feudal/Castle upgrade.
Dark age horsemen aren’t really worth it, And just adds an extra upgrade cost for the mongols.
(I have bigger success Drushing with scouts instead of Horsemen, as scouts are able to heal themselves and do almost as much damage against vills and other scouts)
The Mongols have the mangudai which is very good if you know how to use it and then the khaganate palace is god… gives you 8 horsemen or mangudai free every minute and a half, then in 5 minutes you already have a whole army free in your face…
Of course, the Mongols are a civ of rush in early game, equal to the Huns of aoe 2 and the Lakotas of aoe 3 … it is in those moments in which they are strong, since after the third age they slack, but they still have to defend themselves…
I recently made a thread about the Khaganate Palace.
And I’ve tried making the landmark work in my builds.
But they don’t.
the 8 horsemen is nice, I’d prefer if it only made those all the time.
But its random, which can be quite devastating.
Also the Khaganate palace is imperial landmark, and the matches tend to end not to far from when everyone hits imperial. So those 5 minutes barely stretch.
Regardless, even I the match were to drag on.
The White Stupa is just overall better than khaganate palace.
You are more flexible with the white stupa.
And in comparison to the Khaganate palace.
You also get free units in the form of Stone it collects if you double produce.
but it has the added benefit of Banking up stone resources to produce exactly the kind of units you need, when you need.
Khaganate holds you back, limited to only making units every 90 seconds. not really banking up anything. And whenever your Pop-capped. the landmark becomes useless. While the White Stupa keeps banking stone.
Yes good point, but the Mongols do not use stone since they are a mobile civ, and do not need walls, there an improvement every so often, but if you play aggressive you better the khaganate palace to finish quickly with the game, the white stupa is more situational or if you are going to play more defensive…
they have many gold bonuses with the steppe and food and wood with the ger, which compensates for the lack of keep, for something it is always top
naah, bro, archers simply annihilate mangudai with a bit of support of spearmen.
You will end up having cost-inefficient fights. Mangudais have too short of a range.
Good players don’t take such baits, but it would happen in normal matchmaking.
That does require manual aiming from the opponent. Archers will usually automatically stat shooting on the horsemen first, because they are the closest targets. the Mangudais are in the back and out of range.
The range attack from the mangudai are only there to weaken any chasers such as knights, maa, spears etc when you split them off. henche why I mentioned, don’t build many of them. You technically only need 1 row of them (which shud be 5-8)
You say that, but this is actually more of a technique I’ve learned from BeastyQT and Szalami when they play mongols and use Cav.
And it’s not about players taking the bait or not. It just the way the AI works.
It requires a lot of attention and management to constantly pull in your troops and have them stop chasing.
And putting them on stand ground isn’t always viable especially in the offensive.
Whenever you move the AI, or they get shot at or enemies unit gets to close, the AI will by default always give chase.
This is the exploit you use. Even among the top tier player, you see them spend a lot of effort reining in their troops preventing them from chasing.
And they do slip up when their attention is required elsewhere.
Especially in pro-matches where they fight on many multiple front at the same time.
As I told you, good players don’t take such baits and chase, they keep archers or any ranged units close to their army.
I remember they saying mangudais are trash because they are simply useless. There is no need, and such a short 3-second chase won’t deal much damage.
Devs should try Kurultai themselves how hard to use it, given now even without the 30sec buff.
To unpack and pack Kurultai again and again is hard, especially how easy for building won’t unpack. The range still very small.
It is a very good way to lose when people know how to counter them.
They are trash at high elo especially age2. Mongol also got a stone nerf on ovoo this patch.
There is reason why pro players rate Mongol bottom civ.
Yes, they have to improve that…
Yes, they would have to improve the early of the Mongols, because otherwise they lose their advantage…
Some ideas to improve early game
- start with 7 villagers
- plunder +50 Food and Gold by igniting enemy buildings.
- start with 200 wood
- Any bonus for scouts?
- x2 production of villagers near an ovoo
- outposts cost 90 wood
- fortify outpost
- pasture cost 100 wood
- pasture produce 1 sheep in 1 min
- Improved Early Lancers free in feudal
- TC cost 400W 300S
Any bonus or improvement for outposts wont do good to anyone, most of the players are already sick of tower rushes and it is pretty easy to defend.
We already have it, it is just the TC needs to be in Ovoo bonus area.
Burning more buildings won’t do the trick as it won’t happen in the early game against high-level players. Well mostly. And it will not help the Mongol early economy.
What about increasing the stone production for dark and feudal age again? That way they would get back their dark and feudal age rush abilities. TC in Ovoo bonus area means that it really depends on the map whether you can benefit from it or not, it will not pay out instantly and takes the stone away for army double production.