“I Don’t Believe I’ve Ever Won Against All-In FC Knights, Despite Their Balanced Reputation”
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Although I have thoroughly reviewed all the advice given, I still struggle to apply the ideas in real gameplay.
Based on my experience, countering FC knights demands a level of proficiency that I don’t possess.
I find it challenging to handle cavalry in general, and this particular strategy seems to give me even more trouble.
Being a rated player of about 1100 team RM, I believe knights are a powerful option to play with because they offer high hp, armor, and mobility—making the build order the only thing that requires practice.
Remove 15 HP from knights(heavy cavalry in general ) and make bloodlines give +30 HP instead of +20.
Also increase the food cost maybe.
A more radical change would be having to research the knight to use it 🙂 but that would be game breaking.
Balls out feudal aggression is my only hope when I see someone going FC on open map.
If you can push them off their gold with either MAA or archers, they might make it to castle but they ain’t doing much when they get there.
Remember that MAA shred walls and buildings in feudal.
Best way to win this is play defensive and even consider some stone walling in key areas.
Monks behind walls, prepare pikes or mass up xbow behind walls.
And if he adds siege you add siege
If camels is an option that’s slightly better than pikes but you need to have the same amount of camels as he does knights.
Or if your tatar or huns.
EZ go cav archer
Ok: off the top of my head, up to 1150, these have worked either for or against me.
All-in Feudal (many varieties)
All-in Knights+Camels
Knights+Pikes
Build more stables and go even more all-in than them
Here’s a seven step surefire plan to beat all in knights:
1.Play as bohemians
2.Archer rush hard
3.Keep them off gold
4.Build barracks behind
5.Castle age
6.Mass pikemen
7.Resign (you can’t afford enough pikemen to beat the knights)
Edit:
This is a very unhelpful comment meant in jest.
I should probably provide real advice so I’m adding that now:
Countering an all-in knight push is multifaceted but easily punished *hard* if you pull it off.
In order to do that you’re going to have to a).
Have very strong game sense to know they’ll be going all-in knights and b).
Be willing to sacrifice a lot in the short term.
1.
Determine wether the knights are coming
2.Commit a lot to feudal aggression (the longer you keep your opponent off of gold, the better).
That probably means committing to both archers and a few scouts (2-3 additional on top of your starting).
3.Preemptively build spears on your way up to castle age (you will probably have a worse castle time, try not to let it be too bad).
4.Small wall all your resources (assuming open map).
5.Add in gold units to your small mass of defensive spearmen, either camels (preferably, if you struggle with micro) or monks.
The spears will keep your monks safe from scouts if you go that route.
6.Preemptively counter his counter (ie if you’re all in pikes by this point, add skirms to counter the coming archers).
7.Decide what unit would be best to accompany your current army makeup in a mid-castle push.
This could be siege, knights of your own, xbow, more monks, etc., it just depends on your civ.
You might even go UU and a forward castle!
If you’re doing that while also managing your macro behind it you should have defended from the early castle knight agro *and* have a better eco.
Just remember to spread your pikemen around your base so no matter where your opponent goes they’ll run into pikemen.
The biggest thing will be practicing your monk micro until you’re good enough to effectively use them as a counter to knights.
Great civs to counter knights if that’s what you struggle with the most: Saracens (best camels imo), gurjaras (you can mass camels early and skip spears), bohemians (extra-pokey pokey-bois), Lithuanians (faster pokey-bois, great monks, probably better knights than your opponent).
But knights is the most powerful all-in obv
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Wall up not too far away so you they can’t raid your eco and you can safely get to repair the building they are trying to break.
Start massing pikemen and throw some monks to convert their cav.
That should buy you enough time to create your own strong unit or mass camels if you civ allows.
Just do FC knights yourself
Learn the art of defense.
I’m serious.
It will enable a counter which can defeat them and do so handily
Despite what people might have told you, its not balanced, specially if you play any sort of average or below civ.
Franks are one of, if not the, top civs in basically 99% of ladder and there should be no realistic expectations of any natural player of that elo to somehow not struggle against what is a too easy and too powerful strat that the entire civ is minmaxed into enabling (while not being even that weak elsewhere either).
Specially now that the devs bent over to the complaining and got Hindustanis and Gurjaras destroyed.
The solution here seems pretty clear to me but what do I know, I’m only 900 elo.
If you have the res, camels > pikes or in combination are your on paper counters.
BUT, the clear solution, is to not allow your opponent to mass a snowball of knights in the first place through early aggression and diligent scouting so you can start preparing ahead of time.
Since every aoe2 strat is a case by case, matchup v matchup, map by map many variable inducing game, I think honing early aggression and maintaining your macro growth so you can imp a full castle knight push with heavy camels or halbs is how you beat this.
I’ve only seen a few of these all in knight pushes and I think that low number is exactly due to either early agression disruption or imp advantage over an all in.
Good luck have fun.
I’m only 1100, but I’ve found crossbows to be fairly effective at dealing with Knights.
If they’re going FC they have little to no military and you should be able to do some damage in fuedal.
If they’ve walled by the time you have your fuedal units in position to attack, just sit back and fortify / wall yourself.
Knights can’t really handle palisade + house wall behind.
Then just mass units yourself and go to castle, then add TCs.
FC into knights has a very narrow window where it wins.
Keep in mind you’re going to have the better eco, so capitalize on that and just absorb the pressure as best you can, then hit back when you have the numbers.
The way you beat FC knights is by winning on the eco by booming and not letting them break in to your base in early castle.
You could try some cheesy strats.
Go fast castle then put every new villager on gold.
Build two Monasteries and spam Monks.
Just focus all your attention on the monks.
Move your monk army across the map with a few villagers and start converting stables.
Build a siege workshop and use the monks to cover rams.
A lot of players would panic when the monks show up.
They could switch into light cav, but if you can convert stables you can make your own knights.
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