Team games are an absolute joke when French is playing. Pure cheese gameplay. There is zero diversity in spamming knights to each base endlessly. Going from base to base killing villagers over and over again. There is not enough defensive abilities to stop this cheese strategy.
French and Jean should not be a selectable Civ in team games.
Unfortunately this is specially effective in low ranks.
When you go up in the ladder, you slowly notices this “strategy” is not as feasible as it was in gold/platinum.
I recommend you to watch some videos from some pros and learn to defend your base better.
Can you just pump spears and knights to counter this? What about hitting France eco with some cheap units?
I’m main abbasid, I will explain what I do as them when I get a french in front:
2.1. Once you know what is he going, is time to react. If he’s going all in, you can try to put a second TC fast, and then I recommend you to put a barrack and an archery range. Your goal is to make more archers than him, so you can trade his archers and protect them with spears. For me, works better this than spears+horseman. If you get to defend your base, it’s gg since you will have a better eco.
2.2. If he’s going just to harass, I recommend you that you do a few strategic pallisades protecting your wood, gold, and any other exposed resource by making knights unable to get straight to the resource. Check any Beasty video playing against french and you will know what I’m talking about. Make a barrack and do spears. Normally the french will do between 3-7 knights, so with 5 spears you will be fine, but do as much as you need to defend.
2.2.3. Once you set up your pallisades, and have your spears, it’s time to counter attack. Just get 5-7 spears and go for his gold, deers or boars. Your task is not to kill villagers, as it will be hard with spears, your task is making his villagers idle by retreating, making a tower on the gold to defend from you, and make him put his attention on his base. All the attention he’s putting on his base is attention he’s not giving to yours, so he will probably idle his knights to solve the situation or even retreating the knights to defend.
2.3. Once you have the situation under control, just get to castle, mass units (remember you will have a better eco), and flood his base and it’s gg.
As main abbasid, I get so happy when a french is in front as I know exactly what is he doing and how to counter it. This also applies to team games, but you will need to adapt a bit depending on what are your team mates or the other enemies doing.
Remember a few good pallisades and some towers make knights useless.
It’s not pure cheese gameplay. It’s just that teamgames comp are all about playing the strenght of your civ to synergize with your allies. And mobility being really good on larger maps having one knight civ is mendatory.
Even if somehow French/JD are banned players will switch on Rus and mongol and if you ban those as well Dehli Ghazi raiders and ottoman sipahi will do it or players will play fast castle civ like ayyubids.
On top of what @joanka93val said I would add that harassing the knight civ player is often a good move early on. His job is to give a breathing room to his allies so he entirely commits on knights (especially french, rus is somewhat “immune” to that because of the Kremlin), it will become difficult for him to do such a thing. In fact that’s supposed to be one of the jobs of your knight civ ally.
Fun bonus if the knight civ player is on a flank spawn (so in 3V3 / 4V4) you can even send a squad of spearmen to harrass him. Sure it may not kill a lot of vills compared of going full mobile units but you will either force him to make his own archers or to ask his ally playing the archer civ to travel all the way to help him. It’s funny to see how it can mess up the entire dynamic of the game if it makes the opponent panic.
Against french you need to watch your team mate too and go help him if necessary.French,english combo early raid hits so hard by the way its nearly destroys you.