Hera said the deal comp is one gold, one trash, one siege.
But are others like Britons, Vietnamese, Mayans, Chinese, and Malay exempted from this rule, better for double gold comp?
There are exceptions from this rule. But friom th 4 civs you listed I would only count Mayans as one of them.
3 civs have Gold Bonusses that are sufficient enough to justify double Gold:
Mayans, Malians and Portuguese…
Some civs have quite bad trash wars and want to end the game before:
Franks, Mayans, Aztecs, Cumans, Celts, Gurjaras, (Turks)…
Some civs have interesting alternatives that synergize well with a double gold comp play like
Franks, Gurjaras, Turks, Incas…
And then we have one civ that can go for double gold cause of one insane tech
Poles
And ofc we always have that clownery stuff going on in arena.
If you are interested, I made once a Thread about hypothetical Trash units that could be made to synergize well with the gold units in the game that currently don’t have a natural trash partner:
The idea that Hera tries to convey here with the “one gold one trash one siege” is give you something balanced that can work long-term without draining your gold, or unbalancing the eco. There are numerous exceptions however, for example:
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Meso all-in: generally involves mostly Eagles, a few Xbow, Monks & Mangonels - the idea is that gold units are a bit more powerful, and here you spam gold units in an attempt to finish the game fast. The correct response, funnily, is to defend with a double gold comp yourself, generally, mostly Xbow with a few (mostly unupgraded) Knights to tank Eagles.
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standard civ Castle Age all-in: same as above, but the comp is Knight + Xbow + Mangonel, the goal is to win in Castle Age.
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some civs have inexpensive unit combinations that are gold-based and synergize well, for example, Gurjaras can do Shrivamsha + Camel + Chakram mix, because the gold price of the units is not high, and for example what threatens a Chakram (Archer-line or Onager) generally dies to Shrivamsha.
At high level, this game is more about transitions that doing a “trash + gold + siege”, for example, if you were forced to make a lot of Skirms in Feudal, and you are against an Archer civ, it can be natural to upgrade Elite Skirm (which is an expensive upgrade, so there is such a thing as “forcing a transition” also, generally you never want to be the one always switching units because units, especially trash units, are generally good only with upgrades). Now back to our example, since Skirms die to Knights (which Archer civs can mix in, too, if needed), it can be logical to mix in a gold unit, for example Knights, of your own (and not Pikes because Pike + Skirm is not good for attacking the opponent’s base), at which point you have one of the classic comps of Castle Age like Knight + Skirm, which is a common case of what a cav civ can play vs an archer civ.
However, other civs play differently like I said. For example, Tatars in Castle Age would like to play Knight + Cav Archer, but this is unfeasible, because you can’t just send 45 vills to gold in early Castle, since you need to develop your eco also, so this comp is impractical and you see either pure Knights, or pure Xbow and then later switch into CA (CA is very expensive per unit). Late game, a civ like Tatars plays Hussar + heavy CA and not Knight + heavy CA both because you need a food dump for the 50+ farmers you likely have (the Hussar), and because there is little advantage of having Knights as meatshield over Hussars, on top of Knights draining your gold faster, of course (and gold in Imp starts to be scarce). So you see all of this stuff comes together naturally and from numerous considerations, for example Tatars late game do play Gold + trash + Siege but because their ideal trash unit (Hussar) is also what can allow them to burn food.
To repeat, a lot of considerations go into building a comp, including how fast you want to win, whether your eco can afford double gold comp at that stage (and whether 2x gold comp makes sense at that point, for example if the opponent has 2 defensive Castles, no 2x gold comp can break that easily in Castle Age), and what unit the enemy is making. The rule Hera gives of “1 trash 1 gold 1 siege” is simply to help 1.5k+ players who often can play pure Xbow flood and 4-6 Scorpions or a handful of Mangonels beat your comp, or even enough +2 Knights. It’s more of a guideline. His rule probably makes sense until like 2k ish where you want to do a bit of everything, like 3 TC boom, make a bit of army, etc., but also has important exceptions (e.g. like said Meso all-in you would be dumb to follow the rule and make Pikemen or Skirms instead or responding with your own 2x gold comp).
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Archer+Spear+Trebuchet
Archer+Spear+BBC
Double gold combo is possible. Eagle+Archer+Siege is a hard combo to deal with.
Can literally go for every possible combo in the game except gunpowder. Or even double gold combo knight/camel+archer.
In the end, there is no hard and fast rule that you must make one gold + one trash + one siege combo.
it really depends
for example
this is countered by pure mass skirms
so in a lot of cases, as an archer civ you actually want/need some knights (or as americans you should almost always have eagles regardless of the comp)
like a britons, their knights are good enough to counter skirms.
gold is much easier to come by, than food ( un til imperial), making gold comps generally easier to build up/sustain than comps with multiple food units. surprisingly this applies to upgrades as well.
skirms/pikes/militia/scout line are all expensive to tech into, making it even harder to add these units to a your comps
as opposed to simply running the cheaper and easier to “harvest” gold comps
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