One of the bonus of the english civ is having the possibility to do maas right from age one. At first glance it is a nice bonus as other civs have only access to spearmen in age 1 and maas eat spearmen for breakfast. But is it really a good bonus?
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Fights rarely occurs this early in the game, usually it comes during mid-age 2 when opponents have access to their own maas , in addition to archers and some cavalry.
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Age 1 english men at arms are just that : Age 1. When they face their Age 2 opponents, english have a disavantage unless they upgrade to Age 2. There is a cost associated to that, a cost that other civs don’t have to pay as their first maas are already Age 2 maas.
Am I missing something here?
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In practice its not that good for early rushing.
Tc’s are way too defensible to simply attack with a few MAA so you end up severely delaying your age 2 by committing to them.
Top this off with the fact people can age up in around 5 minutes, this makes and english MAA rush have an extremely short timeframe.
I can only see 2-3 of them being used to harass early eco/defend from some early archer/spear rush.
Its also unclear how much their MAA tech actually helps considering its only +2 armor atm.
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I am not super convinced about age 1 pressure. I did it with mongol during the first closed beta but it seem better to just rush age 2 ASAP for better units. I don’t know if it’s different for brit but the fact than TC can shot arrow with no vils in, i don’t know what kind of damage you can do (maybe denie the gold mine idk)
Using TurnSpender’s AOE4 Combat Simulator, I made some tests of maas vs TC.
I was surprised, 10 maas (Age 1 maas, no upgrades) take down a non garrizoned TC with half of them alive at the end.
But they all die to a garrizoned TC (I tested garrizon with 5 units and 10 units).
Of course, 10 maas early in the game is a huge amount of ressources that slow down your aging. So it won’t happen. But I was able to see how much better is a garrizoned TC compare to an empty one. Much better!
And range is not implemented in this combat simulator (the advantage of striking first compensate for this). But in real life (real game), because of the range, TCs will do a bit better than in the simulator.
I tried to do stuff like fast MAA from around 1:30 but its pretty bad. The idea is you get them off gold but you can just make an outpost within range of the TC and gold and then its rush over. Any later MAA build, well, they’re already off gold and wood is so close to the TC so you can’t harrass it so who cares.
I think looking at their MAA in a vacuum makes them look weaker than they are. For example since English villagers get bows you can rush with 3 MAA and ~6 vils. Force them off gold using MAA to tank and your villagers as archers, then tower their gold. Follow up with more MAA and council hall longbows.
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Interesting enough.
Not sure though that it would work often. The six rushing villagers are going to slow down your economy and the longbows will be somewhat delayed.
This being said, I think that this strategy desserves a few tries. May be there are good chances of success on a small map where you find the ennemy early and don’t have to walk 1 minute to get there.
English are described as a defensive powerhouse. Early men at arms point in another direction and hopefully some useful strategies with them will pop up when thousands of players will play the game.
I think the only advantage really is that you could start making them while you are transitioning to feudal rather than have to wait until you reach age2 to start training them.
May be in that respect the council hall should train longbows and maas. Giving a choice to the english.
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what is this combat simulator? where do i get my hands on it?
If you find the thread “Men at arms”, the link to this simulator is in the first post.
Or try this : Aoe4 Combat Simulator by TurnSpender