I think this is what @HealFortress means
I think it can work, if you have extremely good micro. but against mangudai with their bonus damage against siege this is super risky imo. also mongols can:
-add light cav
-use their mobility to simply fight somewhere else
-use their own faster Onagers to either micro against them or again, attack elsewhere
I’d also add camels+rams on the mental list of options.
Camels are at least theoretically great vs all sorts of cavalry archers. They are fast enough to chase them down and get big bonus damage. They don’t do that well if the cavalry archers are protected by a layer of halberdiers or even champions (camels have low pierce armor, anything that buys a lot of time for the cav archers is good), but mangudai are usually protected by hussars, which camels chew through pretty fast. (Although champions are an option with the Mongol tree, but who ever uses champions?)
What mangudai can do against camels is hit and run, keep running back to cover, like a castle. That’s where the rams come in, they threaten the castle while also drawing arrowfire. And as a bonus mangudai are of course produced from castles, so taking them out is useful in two different ways.
Is it the best option? Probably not, but it’s certainly an option.
mangudai deal bonus damage against rams. attacking mongol castles with rams is usually ill advised
@TheConqueror753 Something like that, though the way I would do it is the same way I rapidly hotkey a group of monks.
Ctrl + qwertyuiop (pinky+thumb while Ctrl clicking monk portraits out into their assigned groupings)(same thing for siege onagers)
Siege onagers = no attack stance
Attack different points of the mangudai formation or key points rapidly one by one per hotkeyed siege onagers/s.
Followed by circling back to the first hotkey to retarget all hotkeys one by one.
It takes a little more setup, but it’s quick enough and the payoff is great. It’s also maybe easier.
You do you. Personally, I would never waste those hotkeys on control groups, they’re too valuable as actual hotkeys.
I have a good amount of hotkeys below those that keep my play consistent, it helps when each one is learned and there for a reason for personal use rather than possibly forgotten.
Aside from certain ones I failed to put into practices, 100% of hotkeys are used by me each game.(hotkeys that I place and practice specifically)
I find that wasd is too far from the Ctrl and shift keys to be comfortable for certain combined hotkeys - while the zsc keys just under them are comfortable.
Do you have hotkeys on the right hand side of the keyboard? Anything to the right of RFV, or possibly TGB depending on how far over you go?
The numpad tends to carry a bunch of hotkeys for researches I need to use in quick succession per age start.
It also carries the market and a hotkey to select all trade carts and cogs regardless of if they’re busy or not for emergency trade saves if the enemy happens to raid the lanes.
And I do have hotkeys linking the zxcvbnm and asdfghjkl regions, but mostly stopping near the middle of the board for the middle and extending moreso along the bottom to the end to keep things easier to remember. Though arguably the ones farther to the right I need to refine further.
Ah, you have a numpad. I just have a regular keyboard, but I’ve condensed everything down into a highly efficient layout, using primarily the QWER-ASDF-ZXCV block, with T and G occasionally thrown in. And then although I have all the number control groups, I only really use 1-4, sometimes 5.
The reason I love to use qwertyuiop for siege onagers and monk(or add any type of overkill unit to the mix) micro, is because it keeps the 1234567890 groupings free to remain bound to consistent groups rather than having to rebind them each time - it’s also much more comfortable rapidly binding qwertyuiop than it is to do the same with 1234567890 just cause distance and angle on the keyboard.
Your layout is efficient btw.
I get the logic, I think a lot of it comes down to personal preference and playstyle though, you use units like that, I don’t, so I don’t need anything like that.
It’s also very efficient with bombard canons when firing at groups of archers with another unit up front (also helps vs longbows, but helps vs all foot archers when using bombard canons) keeping each shot hitting a different portion of the group helps instead of overkill and possibly targeting the wrong units.
So say you charge with scout cavalry or any other unit that keeps archers busy and then follow up with an accurate and spread out cannon barrage.(also on no attack stance to reduce wasted shots)
One of the main reasons I started this habit was because I dislike hitting my own units with siege attacks, so I required a high degree of control over them to avoid friendly fire.
Well, that, and a desire for quicker monk micro.
Now, my micro is slower than only having monks, or any single type of unit, non-moving and spamming the select idle military hotkey, while that is an option for me, this is the next best thing while having a larger army to work with.
The Ghulam! (+Skirms) I shreded some Mangudai the other day with them
These are all good, at least, options.
In my opinion the best is the Huskarl+halbs spam: they are so annoying when they start to be everywhere.
If you start to attack the opponent in more places then it’s really hard to stop that.
Anyway, let’s be honest: there’s no easy way to beat Mongols in late game.
Is there a “None of the above” option?
Nope. Like Aztec eagles, they’ll just die hard without even catching up to the Mangudai.
They need to get close to destroy the siege bringing down their casltes
Sure, units can hit and run, but if they run forever they can’t protect stuff
Rattan Archers or Genoese Crossbowmen ftw 
also Turk Genitours could be fun.
maybe Elite Shirvamsha Riders could also be viable against the Mangudais.
I wish what you said were true, but drill Onagers eat both Genoese, and Rattans for breakfast. Bombards are not as effective a counter, because Mongol Onagers are less predictable, and therefore less susceptible to attack ground attacks. For the Italians this is compounded by their lack of Siege Engineers. This is further exasperated by Drill Rams forcing bad micro play.
the question was whats best against elite Mangudai, not the Mongol Civ
I guess I see Mangudai as a system, rather than as spiffy Cavalry Archers who hard counter some of the best counters to Archer units. I do not think I can separate them from said system, making anything else I have to say irrelevant to this thread.