Turks are broken for most AOE Players

Hi everyone!

Everybody has heard that turks are Free Elo on low elos (probably up to 12xx, not really sure). To me, they are really broken and impossible to beat for low-mid elo players. The only way to win against turks is to beat them up in very early stages of the game (which is nearly impossible if the turk player walls or if you’re playin on a closed map). The fast imperial Janissary + bombard cannon is nearly unstopable, so if you’re facing this strategy you immediately lose the game. I think the game should reward flexibility and strategy, instead of allowing players to abuse one strategy that works extremely well and has almost no way to counter for the vast majority of players. I know this is not a problem in higher elos, but most players are low-mid elo.

If you play the Turks, it is very easy to spend 3 or 4 matches mastering this easy strategy and make the game unenjoyable for everyone else.

This issue could be addressed by allowing civ bans (just like map bans) or just finally reworking the turks, they are ridiculously over-powered and the only catch they have is that their trash units are very weak, which doesn’t cut it in team games or closed maps for example, where they are impossibe to rush or have unlimited gold sources from trading.

If you are going to say “just play turks then”. I’ve done it, but it gets SO BORING to play the exact same way, match after match and making the game boring for everyone, that I won’t touch that civ, I’d rather losing a fun match that winning a boring and easy one.

What do you think about Turks? What do you think the developers should change to make them more balanced?

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I think turks are too strong on Arena and maybe fortress and need a nerf over there, however there should be Okay on other maps (EDIT to fix weird censorship)

They have a nice and tricky design (missing pikemen and elite skirms) that do not need a change IMO.

I dont think they are unbeatable above 900 ELO, but could be wrong.

I fully agree with the idea of having one (or two) civ ban. Sometimes we just think that there is this one civ on the map we are fed up playing against. And it should be fine/acceptable for everyone to either main 2 or 3 civs, or to not pick the easiest / lamest / most OP civ.

If I had to advise you for some civs against them, I’d say going cavalry while having something against camels. So Berbers, Mongols, Huns, Franks, Persians, etc. Or going Goths/Italians/Mayans and making use of Huskarls/Condotieri/eagles.
On open maps, make scouts and try to break through walls.

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The game isn’t balanced around bad players such as myself. Turks suffer quite badly vs archers, and cavalry. Someone like the Mayans will give the Turks are hard time in the early game.

The Turks lack don’t not have Pikemen or Skirmisher. That means they have a big weakness to both archers and cavalry. Since they don’t have any good non gold units.

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Im not 100% sure what you are complaining about.

Is this thread about Turks on any map, or turks on arena (and similar maps, but tbh, the only really closed map in the pool right now is arena)?

If its about turks on arena, you are right, they are very strong there and very hard to beat. However, if you dread facing them on arena so much, ban the map and you should be fine.

If you complain about them beeing OP overall, I must admit i have never heard this. They are bad to average on open maps, and while I see how they are very good on lower elo closed maps due to having such an easy game plan (drop castle, mass jannies), they are actually pretty complicated to play on open maps because their transitions are somewhat weird.

Can you describe why exactly you struggle against them?

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Hussar says hi.
20 characters.

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But tbh it’s the only trash they really have.
Turks are kinda lost without gold cause they can’t do anything else and the opponent knows it.

BTW is this thread for arena players only? Cause the OP looks for me as it is written by a player only playing arena.

And whilst I agree that the current arena meta with turks is kind of an issue, it’s afaik mostly because of the castle-age clownery.

That may be, but it’s enough for me to be pedantic about Bomber saying they don’t have any good trash units.

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It leads to a situation where the Halberdier can kill all of the Turks trash units. Their skirmishers and spearman-line are basically useless. With only the Hussar, the Turks can’t deal with this unit without making gold units of their own. Their spearmen and skirmishers cannot fight Halberdiers, or even Pikemen.

If you play arena or BF, stay 1tc vs turk FI, make ranged units, you are fine. Don’t just make skirm. Make bows. Also mongols are great if you 1 TC mangudai, they snipe bbcs easily. Or if you play bengalis or aztec going full monk. Turk will have a relatively low number of units. Tanky monk is a nightmare. Gurjaras with shrivamsha is also a good counter to that because the turk gunpowder units don’t do damage to them. You will only die to turk FI if you 3 TC boom. I assume that’s what you do every game

But you’re never going to make Turkish trash units other than the scout cav line, and you’re not going to make only that by the time the other player has halb. The Hussar should be a support unit, to raid, and snipe siege, and take damage if required. It’s units like the heavy cav archer and Janissary that should be killing halbs.

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I think that’s what bomber tried to say.
That once Turks are completely out of gold it looks kinda grim for them. Despite having one of the best hussars in the game, they are completely predictable and have no answer to just halb spam + siege.

Nobody doubts that with the options they have Turks have one of the best lategames in the game. But only as long as they actually have access to gold.

I do not totally agree with you. I"m 1100 elo and I can counter Turks on closed map. With active scooting to prevent a drop castle + map control you can develop your own strat.

The only moment where Im kind of agree with you is when Turks face Aztecs or Incas… In this case it’s really complicated with no cav and average archers to face Turks. Skirms are weak in the early game and elite skirms tech is expansive, so you can be in trouble. Also jannissaries destroy onagers easy with there long range.

My stats show that I won 7 out of 22 1v1 ranked games (31.8%) with Turks and won 9 out of 16 1v1 ranked games (56.3%) against Turks. So I don’t agree.

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Turks are quite good on Arena and Fortress, but not necessarily because of one strong strategy. It’s because they have a few viable options. This makes them much better than Spanish where you can be relatively certain that it’s castle age aggression with castle+conqs.

But… so what? Every map aside from Arabia will always have a relatively small number of dominating civs.
Turks are relatively mediocre (though certainly playable) elsewhere, even on maps which lend itself to castle+UU (e.g. nomad).

Is there any proof for them being OP? Can you back this up with winrates?

11, pure gold. This is all of us after losing a game

Turks are good in Arena, but Poles and Burgundians are OP (Bohemians are quite in the same level as Turks IMO)

On arena they are, 59% WR and the highest pickrate of any civ here.

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That is pretty good data to show how broken turks in closed maps. Normaly high play rate lead to low win rate since players who dont know how to play turks should lose the game but even they win the game.

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That’s what I’m talking about, you shouldn’t be able to easily win a match if you don’t even know how to play the game. There’s a video of a guy who wants to go from completely noob to Pro in a week on age and we was able to win matches playing turks even though he didn’t know how to even play the game.

There’s a couple of thing I’d like to say in response to a lot of the comments in this post.

Some replies talks about how the Turks are useless when they run out of gold, which is true, but my main point here is that they can do the castle drop, imperial rush, janissary + bombard cannons and win the match betwenn 20-40 minutes without even consuming half of the gold on their base. Also on team games the gold supply won’t run out, and on closed maps like Arena, fortress or black forest you won’t be able to disrupt their economy.

Second thing, there’s a lot of comments saying how some specific civs can easily beat turks, which is cool, but you can’t know you’ll be facing turks so why would you pick that civ in the first place?

Third thing, a couple of people said that this is just a noob problem: I have literally seen Viper among other pro players pointing out how hard is to face turks and struggling to face the janissary + bbcs combo.

I think that what really ##### #### ## #### to fight is the early acces to BBCs, because it will snipe your archers / skirms / siege very easily. Also, they can just make 10 jannisary and 1 bbc and to counter that you’ll need to train heavy cav + archers/skirms which requires a lot more in terms of economy and management.

Anyway, there’s been some interesting comments of people truly trying to give some helpful advice, so thank you guys.

Since turks seems to be just fine on open maps, I think a cool feature would be a civ ban, just like the map bans. Maybe 1 or two civs would be just fine. What do you think about that? Some professional tournaments have that, they could add it to the game.