AoE4 - Unit Counter Basics 

Thank you! Glad it was helpful.

Yeah, a large group of streltsy is nearly unstoppable. The best bet is mangonels, but the streltsy just deal so much damage that a solid group can 1 shot mangonels - you have to get lucky and take the streltsy out before they can react.

What about Nest of bees, is their range high enough?

@@jerome6383 The Nest of bees are of similar range to mangonels, pairing with pikemen and a few springalds you will get a deadly yet cost effective combo.

@@jerome6383 Nest of bees are good against them, you just have to make sure that you have enough to kill them before they can close the gap. Bees have a 4 tile range advantage over streltsy; it takes streltsy 3.5 seconds to cover that gap. Reload time on bees is 5.5 seconds - so its important to kill them on the first try, or have a large enough front line to stall them for a few seconds. I'd also make sure to get the tech for 20% extra range on gunpowder units.

@@Waddling_Duck i like my stretlsy, i build them with springalds and micro the springalds to shoot the mangonels before they get in range. archers are the best to go. i go stretsy to counter the french knight spam.

Thanks, Maxiluc!

Thank you!

Thanks!

Yeah, handcannoneers are great against elephants. You just have to remember that 1 elephant costs more than 4 handcannoneers, so it'll still feel like a losing battle as you will be losing a few handcannoneers before an elephant drops. Against tower elephants from range, 4 handcannoneers should easily beat the elephant - its a bit closer if the elephant is getting melee hits in. Against a war elephant in melee range, it's close to a toss-up, but hopefully it never comes to that.

@@Waddling_Duck Thanks, I really appreciate you providing specific numbers too. Wasnt sure exactly how it played out.

@@Waddling_Duck I say go for magonels and spears that is the way to go the problem however is that if the war elephants are massed up they do area damage, and that can be a pain in the ass, specialy if they have tower war elephants with light Cav and monks to heal them.

Thanks!

Hah, true enough. I actually went back after I finished a first draft to add in the part with only the three age 2 units singled out, so that there would at least be a few seconds that were simple.

Thanks! Glad it helped.

The grenadier is one that I wasn't really sure about. On paper, the only hard counter is the horseman. But the grenadier is so rare to see that I haven't really seen how it plays out in actual games. Given the fact that it deals area damage, I imagine they could be deadly to any unit thrown against them. However, they also have the lowest range in the game (tied with the handcannoneer at 4 tiles) and low movespeed, so they should be easy targets for siege.

Sorry about that, lol. I'll certainly pace it a bit slower the next time I do another dense video!

@@Waddling_Duck hahah don't worry, nice video man. Yeah if you do that I think it can help 😬 thanks!

Thanks, Kosaro!

Thanks, Saif!

Interesting find on the tooltip for the Palace Guard - its interesting that the MaA doesn't share that part of the tooltip (about being countered by knights and lancers), since the generic MaA has the same weakness. I didn't see anything specifically referencing horsemen, or did you just mean cavalry in general?

The best bet against a mixed comp of camel riders and camel archers is probably going to maa + archers. Archers don't have a bonus against camel archers, but they trade cost efficiently as the camels are expensive. If camel riders are in play, any cavalry on your end will usually be a bad decision. If they don't have riders, and only have camel archers, horsemen also work well - despite the 20% dmg debuff, the horsemen will still be a cost efficient trade (and they can keep up with camels).

Camel Riders despite being about as expensive are not actually as stout as knights. MaAs and archers can still perform quite well against Camel riders. However if the Abassid player starts mixing Camels and Lancers together it becomes an even more difficult nut to crack.

This is very true - I'm surprised I don't see more early maa. They are common with ram rushes, but I rarely see them for anything else, and never see the English making them.

@@Waddling_Duck Well, you'd only use MAA to counter ranged units, but Longbows already do that by being superior in both attack *and* range, while only costing a measly 10food more. So, if you're going for English you're playing Longbows every time, so what's your frontline? Well, MAA are expensive, slow, and deal no bonus damage to anything, while Spearmen (which English get free upgrades for btw) are cheap and deal a ton of bonus damage to Cavalry. So, Longbows counter anything that isn't Cavalry (MAA are very slow and easy to kite) and Spearmen counter Cavalry, so you're covered on all fronts already with just those 2 very simple and cheap units. That is until age 3, of course, when most civs get access to Siege units.

Even with equal resources (2 maa for each 1 knight), the knight should come out on top. 2 maa combined have roughly the same dps as 1 knight (maa are 6% ahead). However, with the way armor works, the maa lose 36% of their dps against knights, while knights only lose 17% against maa, putting knights significantly ahead. The 2 maa do have a combined 33% more hp than the 1 knight. However, the first maa will die mid-fight, cutting the overall maa dps in half for the rest of the fight. Even without any successful charges, the knight will kill both maa - every charge that you manage to get in will just swing it further in the knight's favor. Not sure when exactly I'll get them done, but I do plan on doing some videos showing different matchups.

@@Waddling_Duck Do you feel like that dynamic in the counter-relationship is going to make the meta of the game a bit one sided? After watching nearly every single stream on this game over the past two days, i've seen A LOT of cavalry and ranged units, but hardly any big men-at-arms plays.

@@darkranger116 Yeah, cavalry and ranged do seem a good bit stronger right now. The biggest problem is that knights are pretty much better than maa in every way - vulnerability to spearmen is the only notable way that knights can be worse. And spearmen die so fast to archers, that it is an easy problem to deal with. The HRE is plenty strong, however their strengths aren't even really the infantry despite being 'the infantry civ'. They just have such a strong early game eco that they can pump out rams early game, and then having access to culverins gives them siege superiority in most late game matchups.

Crossbows. NOT spearman. I find that spearman take at least 2 hits and before they manage to get an effective surround on an elephant. While crossbows massed shoot it down before it reaches them (and gain +6 against the elephants)

I'll keep this in mind and see if I can make a test like that work by myself. Anecdotally from my own experience, I would say that spearmen/horsemen is generally the weaker one, but only if its isolated to those 3 groups, and it's certainly not useless. I use spearmen/horsemen frequently against feudal knights/archers. The biggest problem when its a feudal skirmish between 2 unit armies, is that you're constantly jockeying for position to try and get the right counters on the right units. Archers can safely get some damage off during these shuffles, even if its not on the correct counter. However, it's so common to see cav/archer combos, and the biggest weakness of the spearman is that cavalry can just choose not to engage. If you put horsemen on their archers and have your spearmen mixed in, that's what it takes to force their cavalry to engage, and gives the spearmen a chance to do real damage.

@@Waddling_Duck thanks 😊 I do certainly see the usefulness of the archers as you jockey around. My main thought is that you can use the horses to force an engagement. Keep them in front of your spears and aim for his archers, and I think even if he intercepts with his own cavarly you'll have the upperhand. But need tests to really figure it out.

So I had grouped all of the ranged cavalry together in this video, since most ranged cav weren't included in the beta when I made this guide. Mangudai don't really counter anything (although they can fire while moving, so they can kite everything). Camel archers are mostly just used as a support unit to debuff enemy cavalry nearby, and are only really directly effective against spearmen. Horse archers are generally good against everything, including melee cav.

Lol I think so. I know I really butchered it in this video. Afterwards I went searching for the right pronunciation, and even videos made by German speakers explaining how to pronounce it will have comments from other German speakers telling them they pronounced it wrong.

I'll definitely be making a separate video that goes over just naval combat - keep an eye out for it! I'll try and get it done within the next week. The quick version is 'just play France on water maps', since they get the age 3 ship in age 2.

Yep - once you have access to the hand cannoneer, you should pretty much never build another crossbow (unless you're the French with the arbaletrier). Against heavy units, 1 hand cannoneer is marginally better than 2 crossbows (3% more dps), but it does 40% more than 2 crossbows against non-heavy targets since it doesn't rely on explicit bonus damage against heavy.

@@Waddling_Duck It does have over 20% less hp than 2 crossbows though, 4 instead of 5 range and its cost is shifted more towards gold. Then again its pop space efficient and produced a bit faster than two crossbows.

yep archer vs maa = bad but crossbow vs maa = very good

You've got to mass mangonels against massed hand canoneers. The horsemen are a poor counter against them since their health is so low.

@@LincolnLog yea, horseman is mostly being used in early stage when enemy mass hand cannon, usually you go for mangonel to kill those

Not true. Keep in mind how expensive elephants are, yeah you're not beating them with a single unit but you have to calculate the economic cost, you can trade against them efficiently with 4 handcannoners for example.