Rebalance mangudai

Age of Empires II: DE II - Discussion
1

This is the best unique unit in the game and the most picked civ for team games for good reason. You can single handily win the game by moving all over the map and stalling out siege pushes. They fire so fast, move so quickly, and do so much siege damage that you don’t have to sacrifice your army either. Also in team games it is much more doable to mass them then in a 1v1.

Proposal
Rate of fire +0.1
Mangudai -1 bonus to siege,
Elite mangudai -2 bonus to siege, +1 attack

New Stats
Rate of fire 1.8
Mangudai: 6 attack, 2 bonus damage to siege
Elite mangudai 9 attack, 3 bonus damage to siege

Overall they would still play the same against non siege and need maybe 1 or 2 more volleys against siege in castle age. In imperial age they would do better against non siege but need a few more volleys against siege so making siege onagers could still work. Also it would allow opponents to kill more mangudai since they have to attack siege longer.

2

I don’t think Mangudai need any nerf, it’s only that the event is making you feel like that. There is a difference between playing versus AI on a preset map and playing versus humans on random maps. You cannot hit and run in multiplayer as easily as you can in single player games versus AI. In multiplayer games Mongols rely on Light Cavalry with +30HP and easily massed via stables more than Mangudai who are very slow to be trained. Civs are balanced according to multiplayer games.

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3

This is pretty much a buff

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4

Yes I am talking about multiplayer online games.

5

That’s what I thought as well when I read +1 attack for Elite Mangudai :smiley:
I’m very sure every Mongol player would make that trade for 2 anti siege dmg.

On the topic: I think they’re in a good spot. Them being strong is a big part of Mongol civ design and they’re not oppressively strong (okay, to be fair there are some civs like Slavs who really struggle against them).
Getting to fully upgraded Mangudai (which you need for them to be really strong) should feel rewarding.

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6

even slavs with a faster castle age push or if they get to SO halb can deal with Mongols

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7

Mangudaïs have their fair share of counters. They are weak to counter units like Camels and Skirms, they lack the last armor upgrade so they are weaker to pierce damage unlike other civs with FU HCA, and while they do have bonus damage against siege, one shot from an Onager still wreck them.

8

I’m actually not opposed to giving mangudai a minor nerf. You could fight tooth and nail against mongols post imp and even if you were extremely successful leading up to it, mangudai kill all once you get there. And it’s honestly not difficult to get there once you get 1 castle up in castle age.
Yes, mangudai have counters

  • Skirmishers can snipe them. Arbs are better
  • Heavy siege like siege onagers or heavy scorpion can give them issues, but neither of these things are really realistic in most 1v1s
  • Chasing after them with a greater number of camels is one way to hedge your bets

Big problem, though is that any remotely experienced player is going to know when to not take a losing fight, and mongol post imp options let them get buy with less grease than other civs need. This is especially true on open maps where raiding is endlessly viable. Losing a position? fortify back, raid sides, force opponent to send pop to deal with it, snipe siege. When mangudai see skirmishers, light cav/hussar follows. When mangudai, in decent numbers and in the hands of decent players, see camels and knights, they laugh and dance around them or fall back to their castle if they cant take the fight.

Given certain aspects about de like villager command queueing and server based functionality, it’s meta shifted into heavily favoring defensive play - makes it easier to quickwall - and to have your base full walled in minutes. As someone who’s played for very aggressive all-ins in the past before de, i could open with military and interrupt walling or if not, force engagements via tower but since towers have been nerfed it’s heavily affected the meta to discourage committment to feudal aggression.

Even with that out of mind, once you actually have a castle up and are making mangudai, it’s so easy to get by with them. Once 2 castles go up it’s basically game over because you can’t push 2 castles in castle age and fighting mongols in post imp is almost impossible.

The only real exceptions to this are when the players aren’t an equal skill level, which make for bad examples. Two players making the most out of their play, the mongol player is rare to lose if they camp which is mongols forte in castle age.

I had a game not too long ago, magyars vs mongols
I opened with a pretty aggressive scout rush, almost all-in. I was very behind to castle age and he was in my base with a bunch of xbows - but of course since I was all in feudal I knew I had to stay to clear the army, and I made an obscene amount of scouts, wiped out the xbows, clicked up. This turned into a castle age all in with knights, light cav, rams EVERYWHERE. I was killing so much of this guys eco consistently that it’s a shock i didn’t have a bigger lead; he gets one castle up which doesnt bother me, but it makes fighting his mangudai impossible (since any time my cav charged hed go back to his castle, just like the real mongols) so i had to go in to skirms. But yeah, no he gets 2 or 3 castles up and gets imp. I’m not far behind him, but I call it after my army cancels his army of mangudai out (it was fought under a castle so i lost most of mine) and he told me at the end “I don’t really know how I won that”. In good faith, I’m not exaggerating about my success in castle age. I rammed one of his 3 tcs down, was constantly killing villagers on wood and gold, but once he got castle up I couldn’t push into the deepest part of his eco so it stopped mattering. All in ram pushing a mongol castle isn’t realistic even if you have a lot of army because of how easy it is for modest numbers of mangudai to snipe them and hop back in.

To talk of counter civs though; very good archer civs with above average siege options can give mongols problems. The most viable in 1v1s is vietnamese rattans with bombard cannons to snipe onagers. Ethiopians are a follow-up with their arbalests and their own onagers. The problem with that though, is that teching siege onager in a 1v1 is very expensive, and past a certain point in a 1v1 all mongols have to do is keep their mangudai alive and spam hussar (one of the most cost-effective hussars in the game, probably second to magyar/bulgarians) to win.

For this reason, mangudai aren’t as strong in closed map team games. The only time I’ve seen mangudai struggle were in an oasis 3v3 i was in. My ally was fighting against ethiopian arbalest and siege onager behind bulgarian halberdiers.

So in short, yeah. I understand the necessity for civs to be strong in post imp, but mongols are probably the best post imp civ in the game because of how easy and streamlined their options are. Mangudai feel too strong. They DESERVE to be strong, but past a certain point it’s over gratuitous.

If I were to nerf them, I’d make them SLIGHTLY slower, and maybe take ONE bonus damage away from their bonus vs siege

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9

9+4 attack mangudai are you kidding?
Then they will destroy literally everything, if not already.

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10

This topic we already discuss a lot. Since we know that Mangudai are really strong maybe the strongest unit in the game, don’t think they will nerf anyway because many are against any need due to many reason like Mongols are not OP or Mangudai should be strong, a reason to play with Mongols.
I think the best is to let it unchanged same as the Dev decide not to nerf the Leitis.

11

Mangudai aren’t good just because of their siege bonus. We know this because when Forgotten removed the siege bonus for everything except Rams Mangudai were still considered a great unit. Then they actually nerfed Mangudai by giving them reload delay, and that nerf was fine.

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12

No, because Mangudai effectiveness scales with player skill.

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13

Giving Elite Mangudai +1 attack would make them extremely OP, I don’t think that’s necessary at all.

I’d be OK with a minor nerf to their siege bonus as right now you can snipe 2-3 trebs for free and run away with no opportunity for your opponent to stop you.

However, the Mongols have no eco bonus beyond the Dark Age hunt bonus and it takes FOREVER to get fully upgraded Mangudai with adequate production from 4-5 castles. The problem is that at lower levels, people play very passively and don’t attack during the timing window that they need to with their civ. Every civ has a power spike at different points in the game, if you just let the Mongol player boom and get to 50-60 Mangudai, yeah, you’re screwed, and that’s OK- because you left them untouched for so long and you get punished for that.

I think Paladins and Elite Battle Elephants are very powerful and it’s nice to have at least 1 ranged unit that can take them on when microed properly.

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14

You only need two, even in castle age you can get by with one if your castle is in a good defensive position. Even with modest upgrades, mangudai in castle age are unfightable if the player is playing cognizantly and retreating to their castle with them any time they see a bad fight. You can’t ram push mongols once they get a castle up, it’s honestly ridiculous

As a rather experienced and very aggresive player (3-4 years of 1v1s and I rush most of the time) this doesn’t apply to me and even at medium and higher elos you can exploit mongol weak windows and still lose. I described doing this in my above post, where i was constantly ramming down tcs and slaughtering villagers with light cav, and consistently had like double the numbers of army than my opponent. Once they get a defensive castle up they can stabilize and just snowball that into more castles and more mangudai to the point where having an economy lead over them doesn’t really do anything if you can’t win in a field fight - or rather even if you can win, they just run back to their castles because they’re one of the fastest land units in the game and don’t have to committ to fights.

Mongols have a sink in power in early castle age but it’s not difficult at all to structure your build to be a scout rush into early castle then boom. Even if two players are of similar skill, someone playing mongols that knows how to defend (given how obsessively defense meta the game is now) and execute a unique unit based build has a pretty streamlined win condition. Even players at the very top struggle massively against mangudai .
In a set with Hera and Nicov (iirc), Hera was mongols and Nicov was chinese. Nicov was pressuring actively but when it came to post imp it was just run forward with mangudai, snipe trebs, leave. In a game Daut vs MBL, Daut was khmer vs mongols and despite his aggression, MBL was able to stabilize and run around with a massive ball of mangudai that never died. Mbl vs one of the brazilian players (i think? I want to say dogao but i can barely remember) it was mongols vs byzantines. Byzantines took out 2 castles, a lot of economy, and mbl only had one castle to produce mangudai. Byzantines made arbalest, skirm, halb and won several fights, and even held against a drill siege ram push, and still lost. ONE CASTLE mangudai production in IMP, was on the back foot for like an in game hour, and won.
Hera played a game vs Daut, Slavs vs Mongols. Hera, knowing that there’s nothing slavs can really do once mangudai start rolling, tried ram pushing with knights but could never get through because of how easy it is to defend nowadays especially with mongols. Repair castle, snipe siege with mangudai, jump back in.

The only time in recent memory I remember mongols losing at the top level was around NAC3 and Hidden Cup 3 where they lost to Persians; who most pros at the time agreed they were pretty over-buffed hence their nerfs. (kamandar crossbows were much cheaper, stronger eco bonus, and many of these maps were hybrid maps which put persian faster docks to use.)

So yeah, if you know someone has a unique unit that your civ doesn’t have an answer for (and MOST civs don’t have an answer to mangudai), then kill them before they get the castle up. Problem with that reasoning against mongols is that

  • their Feudal age is amazing and will almost always be there faster than you unless they’re taking a risk and going for a greedy fast castle
  • Even if you do have success in feudal and early castle, once the castles come up the eco difference stops mattering that much and mongol player can stabilize once they get like 5~ mangudai since ram pushing mongols is suicide

The only time in recent memory that I won vs mongols with a castle up was against a lower rated player in Ranked on Acropolis. I was Indians (which is often cited as a counter pick to mongols because of their imp camels and amazing eco). There were scout wars, but really the only reason I won was taking a risk and selling at market to click up faster. Once I was in castle first, I TCed one of his lower woodlines and took it for myself, and started teching into skirmisher and camel. He got mangudai out and my camels were chasing, while i was sending armies to cease his expansion down from the acropolis and it ultimately worked because I had his hill surrounded by the end of the game.
Despite all this I couldn’t ram one of the castles down :laughing: but I mainly won because I took advantage of the map and denied him from map control since I knew he was going for mangudai.
This is much less likely to happen on arabia, where you are sure to have places to expand and take wood from.

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15

I agree that Mangudai are a fantastic unit even when they’re not fully upgraded, and in the hands of pro players and their micro potential they’re extremely powerful. However, civs with a good eco bonus or units that match up well vs Mangudai have a pretty convincing advantage. All the Meso civs with eagles, deal very well vs Mangudai. Goths once they’re rolling have a good matchup of Huskarl v. Mangudai. Huns can do a 1 TC aggressive push that overwhelms Mongols.

Civs like Vikings, Mayans, Franks, and Indians with good eco bonuses should pull ahead of the Mongols player in Castle Age with their eco and get to imp first, allowing them to start applying pressure to the Mongols player earlier.

The Mongols are one of my favorite civs to play, but their weakness is that it can take a while to get to their ideal army composition, when in the meantime other civs with eco bonuses and good army compositions to match up vs them can get there faster and keep them from getting that scary critical mass of Mangudai.

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16

It’s not as easy to do that in team games as 1v1. It’s much more likely they get to their mangudai mass in TG which becomes unstoppable.

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Again, IF the other team lets you get to that army composition, yes, Mongols are basically unstoppable. But other civs have eco bonuses and much cheaper army comps that deal with Mongols well. A Meso civ can get to Imp and Elite Eagle or Mayans can get Elite Plume that trade very well vs Mangudai.

If Mongols are left to free boom on an open map, they are one of the most dominant civs with a hard-hitting, mobile military- but it takes a long time for them to get their with no eco bonus outside of Dark Age and so other civs can try to punish that.

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