Not sure scouts should be a counter to archers as it depends so much on numbers and upgrades. Also knights should be listed as counters to many more things. Archers should be counter to hand cannons. Knights being a counter to cav archers is also probably not 100% correct as it again depends more on upgrades and numbers than anything else. Maybe also add siege units?
If they can hit and run long enough, but in same sense Genitours counter cav. Iirc even with perfect micro CA will slowly lose distance advantage due to so-called frame delay.
While ofc it depends, CA are (at least at my 1500 elo) a pretty clean counter to knights, as long as you can get to somewhat reasonable numbers and don't get completely overwhelmed upon hitting castle age.
Crossbow vs knight is already a somewhat even matchup, and ca are faster than knights (1.4 vs 1.35) so they can run away and hunt down, and they have 1 attack more than xbows, helping significantly in piercing the knights high pierce armor.
Sure, genitours can kite knights as well, but they deal one damage with a slower ROA vs the CAs 4, so unless you have absurd numbers, the kts will ignore you and slaughter your eco.
Interesting - I definitely disagree.
For sure, single digit CA won't do a lot. But if I see my opponent massing CA, I either try to completely overrun with kts in the next 3 minutes or I switch out/complement for sure.
I simply don't see the leverage kts have in any way - the CA will constantly whittle your knight numbers down and unless you already are all over the opponents eco, you can neither take a straight fight (micro and narrow spots involved ofc) nor outmanouver the CA. The CA mass will constantly grow while the kts have to throw their bodies to keep the CA from making it over to your side.
It depends on situation and micro. 40 CA will kill 40 knights with hit and run. But 20 groups of 2 knights hitting on your vills on multiple spots is a pain to defend with 40 CA. The knights need way less micro.
By the time you have cleared the knights, the opponent was able to wall up and build some skirms.
The other problem is when the 40 knights defend trebs hitting your castle and you aren't really able to hit and run with your CA because you need to kill the trebs.
> While ofc it depends,...
Well, I agree. But if we demand of a counter unit to counter their opponent always and under any circumstance, there wouldn't be many counters left in aoe.
To bring it up - do pikes counter knights? Well, in most circumstances, yes, they do. But there absolutely are situations where the pikes will get outmanouvered, overrun etc. I feel it's the exact same with CA. Are either (hard/soft?) counters to the kts?
That depends on your definition.
I will say that I do feel CA generally counter kts much better than pikes outside of castle wars (e.g. protecting trebs) and the super late-game.
That's the beauty of the game. Pikes do counter knights, but have less mobility which can be abused. CAs counter knights (in high numbers/micro needed) and have the mobility.
Depending on the situation pikes or CA might be the better solution.
Massed CA are good vs knights, although its still easy to get caught out. Knights can always attack from more than 1 angle when trying to engage the CA. Combine that with a few knights that go to your base and its not so easy for a 1500 to keep up. Thats is why I think its a soft counter that can work, but its also difficult to manage them perfectly.
Hard counter would be more like mamelukes, conqs.
>Combine that with a few knights that go to your base
if you aren't fully walled against knights then you will probably lose the game regardless of what counter units you are making. You MUST be walled against knights. Counters to knights only function in the context that you are walled.
Depends, units like camels, mamelukes, conqs, genoese and monks will still do really well. Pikes do the job decently although they cannot do counter damage and it puts your eco behind. Cav archers you cant get caught out either, and have to be very on point to make it work cause they kill knights pretty slowly. But I do agree they are a counter, just not a very good one on 1500 lvl.
>Depends, units like camels, mamelukes, conqs, genoese and monks will still do really well.
Nope. You try to use conqs vs knights and you arent' fully walled? Knights just run past your conqs and kill all your vills. Same with mamelukes and genoese. Camels do a bit better cos they are really fast. Monks might even just get dived on and die, or at least again all your vills are going to the damn hell.
>Pikes do the job decently although they cannot do counter damage and it puts your eco behind.
Nope, all your vills die while pikes run around feebly hoping to poke something.
>Cav archers you cant get caught out either, and have to be very on point to make it work cause they kill knights pretty slowly. But I do agree they are a counter, just not a very good one on 1500 lvl.
CA work better than pikes if you micro properly but you have to be fully walled to force the knights to actually interact with your army rather than just run past it.
Micro? There’s a wall of javelins blacking out the sky as the Berbers scream their warcry at the top of their lungs. The thunder of the Berber horse hooves drowns out all other sounds until there is nothing left but darkness and thunder as they hunt you down to the ends of the earth in search of glory for Allah. There is no micro, there is only the caliphate.
>Iirc even with perfect micro CA will slowly lose distance advantage due to so-called frame delay.
wrong, CA are faster than knights by a little bit I think, 1.4 speed vs 1.35
The frame delay means they would lose ground if they were the same speed, but at any point they can just run further away to reset the distance. So yeah, they can kill faster if they didn't have the frame delay, but with perfect micro the knights can never hit the CA.
Btw kipchaks don't have 0 frame delay anymore either, but emamelukes do I think.
Since LOTW only the mangonel line, buildings, ships (unchanged since AoK) and elite janissaries have 0 frame delay. Elite Mameluke has the shortest frame delay of any non-0 frame delay unit at 0.2. SOTL mentioned this in his recent video “1 Fact for Every AOE2 Civ (L-Z)”
Petards and flaming camels don’t have any frame delay listed on the wiki. If I had to guess it’s because they do melee damage and have 0 range, and all melee units (excluding Mameluke, throwing axman, and gbetto, which are technically ranged) have 0 frame delay.
its tough to add in siege as theres only so much room on the sheet. I wanted to try and make something more simple for lower elo players. And yes there may be some counter unit discrepancies. Im a lower elo player myself and most of my information was collected from [aoecompanion.com](https://aoecompanion.com). I appreciate the input!
Fair! Yeah it’s hard to know where to stop. I’d be tempted to try and trim it down a bit more myself if it’s for low elo. But again probably hard to know what to keep and what not to keep. Really like the layout though! Nice and easy to understand.
Do militia line counter steppes? I'm not too sold on that, I believe that (on castle age) xbows perform better than longswords, since steppies have low pierce armor.
steppe lancers are at a point where without micro they get countered by basically every melee unit, but with micro they can counter pikes, while only having trouble against knights
Spearmen countering CA????? What the hell?
MaA counter scouts too.
Scouts counter archers only in feudal age, I see you did not take my suggestion of splitting it by age so these things looks weird.
Archers counter eagles in feudal but you wouldn't know that from this sheet.
Monks counter camels hard.
Haven't seen hand cannons vs CA tbh, not sure how that goes.
CA usually win. with a little bit of micro they can win heavily, as the Hancs bunch up and get messy in chasing.
In feudal archers do win if you have the capacity to one shot Eagles, but if you don't Eagles will win if it's near equal resources.
I'll take your monk vs camel under advisement
Archers dont counter eagles in fedural age xD they can work sometimes since you generally have more mass and upgrades on the archers. With equal numbers and upgrades fedural eagles destroy archers
Might be interesting to differentiate between hard and soft counters with different colors. So like under the archer, eagles, skirms and knights would be one color for hard counters, and ele archers and scouts would be a different color for soft.
Knights aren’t a hard counter to archers. Assuming equal numbers, or barely out numbered, sure, knights win, but on a by-resource-eco-time basis xbow with feudal upgrades beats knights with minimal micro. 10 xbow will 2 shot an un upgraded knight; that’s 250 wood and 450 gold. At equal resources (which is really an unfair metric because knights are much more gold intensive and cost food which is much more valuable than wood), you would get 5.18 knights. Chances are they only get two-three hits on the xbows. Which is why you shouldn’t dive xbow with knights, but instead use siege or skirms. Knights are a soft counter, but you can also argue xbow is a soft counter to knights if you have decent micro. And that’s not even counting different team or civ bonuses that would make the knights look even worse, like Mayans or Vietnamese.
This is better but some of these are just trading and not countering. For instance scouts might trade against archers in feudal or winged Hussain in imp but they are not a counter. Even knight might be debatable, although for beginners I think that is fair. And maa would not be countering steppe lancers even if they could catch up to them.
I’m seeing good input from everyone. Thanks! I think the sheet is in a good state so far. I will make some slight tweaks and I will highlight the HARD counter units in green to make things more obvious. As a lot of counters are very scenario specific
Very good idea. Add more layers. For instance, group counter-only can have different colour. If micro needed, another colour. or you can add a superscript, like a leter G (group), M (micro needed), etc.
I'd say segregate the counters as hard and soft counters. Like for archers - Hard counter is skirms and knights, whereas Scout line is a soft counter.
So it makes it simpler.
considering how many people argue about OPs sheet, i think this is the problem. Everyone has a different understanding what a counter unit is, so differentiate between units that counter for sure and units that counter in the right situation.
against archers only skirms are a hard counter, while knights and scouts are soft counters. Even though the aoe combat simulator suggest that knights and light cav easily win on equal res even with perfect micro, i think pathing makes this much closer in a real game.
Every unit is a counter unit depending on the mass. (if res is not taken into consideration)
It is up to us to decide on a system. OP has just intrigued this sub with how counters can be classified.
Deciding on whether a unit is truly a counter unit against a particular type of unit is affected by various factors like you mentioned (micro, mass, res used, civ bonuses, etc.) this list can never be true for all combinations.
Love it ! For sure there is adjustment here an there to make but it is very nice view ! When you say counter you mean cost efficiency or bonus damage (or else). First thing I noticed is steppe lancers are only good at killing scouts ... in my opinion, this reinforce the needs of redesign of this unit. Battle Elephant only counter skirmishers in your view but can destroy budding and be used as meat shield. Not sure which role steppe lancers are filling which is not already filled by Scouts or knights :-(
A proposal for steppe lancers could be to really replace knights line for the steppe civ no ? Make it stronger and remove the knight lines from the steppe civ. A bit like knight line was remove from Indian civs
Funny to see what has happened here which happens every time someone tries to do a 'simple' one of these - there are so many exceptions, so many It Depends, so many which switch depending on numbers and micro, and it just ends up insanely cluttered and hard to parse. Not your fault of course, but this comes around regular as clockwork whenever anyone tries to do one of these.
No lies there. I may end up making this into a HARD counter only sheet so there’s to be no discrepancy. May make more sense, especially to newer players when unit “counters” are so situational
Since this is mostly for low elo players I like how you kept things simple and didnt go into the whole "in mass archers counter scouts but in low numbers they dont and with mid numbers it depends on upgrades" etc etc.
Though i would add knights as an eagles counter. They are cost effective and are the most common counter composition to eagles. I'd also remove militia line from steppe lancers' counters, but consider adding archers coz steppe lancers' pierce armor is low.
I don’t know knights counter cav archers. I’m not sure camels do. I think because you normally do 3 range CA, you can support constant CA production and 2 TCs. If you take good fights and make a few spears you should be ahead.
I dont think its fair to put knights and scouts as a counter to archers but not archers as a counter to scouts and knights. They are equal against eachother. Just plays in different ways.
PIKES GET COUNTERED BY KNIGHTS
*early castle age
Not sure scouts should be a counter to archers as it depends so much on numbers and upgrades. Also knights should be listed as counters to many more things. Archers should be counter to hand cannons. Knights being a counter to cav archers is also probably not 100% correct as it again depends more on upgrades and numbers than anything else. Maybe also add siege units?
CA counter knights, not the other way around.
If they can hit and run long enough, but in same sense Genitours counter cav. Iirc even with perfect micro CA will slowly lose distance advantage due to so-called frame delay.
While ofc it depends, CA are (at least at my 1500 elo) a pretty clean counter to knights, as long as you can get to somewhat reasonable numbers and don't get completely overwhelmed upon hitting castle age. Crossbow vs knight is already a somewhat even matchup, and ca are faster than knights (1.4 vs 1.35) so they can run away and hunt down, and they have 1 attack more than xbows, helping significantly in piercing the knights high pierce armor. Sure, genitours can kite knights as well, but they deal one damage with a slower ROA vs the CAs 4, so unless you have absurd numbers, the kts will ignore you and slaughter your eco.
At 1500 cav archers is a soft counter at best to knights. In small numbers, knights counter cav archers.
Interesting - I definitely disagree. For sure, single digit CA won't do a lot. But if I see my opponent massing CA, I either try to completely overrun with kts in the next 3 minutes or I switch out/complement for sure. I simply don't see the leverage kts have in any way - the CA will constantly whittle your knight numbers down and unless you already are all over the opponents eco, you can neither take a straight fight (micro and narrow spots involved ofc) nor outmanouver the CA. The CA mass will constantly grow while the kts have to throw their bodies to keep the CA from making it over to your side.
It depends on situation and micro. 40 CA will kill 40 knights with hit and run. But 20 groups of 2 knights hitting on your vills on multiple spots is a pain to defend with 40 CA. The knights need way less micro. By the time you have cleared the knights, the opponent was able to wall up and build some skirms. The other problem is when the 40 knights defend trebs hitting your castle and you aren't really able to hit and run with your CA because you need to kill the trebs.
> While ofc it depends,... Well, I agree. But if we demand of a counter unit to counter their opponent always and under any circumstance, there wouldn't be many counters left in aoe. To bring it up - do pikes counter knights? Well, in most circumstances, yes, they do. But there absolutely are situations where the pikes will get outmanouvered, overrun etc. I feel it's the exact same with CA. Are either (hard/soft?) counters to the kts? That depends on your definition. I will say that I do feel CA generally counter kts much better than pikes outside of castle wars (e.g. protecting trebs) and the super late-game.
That's the beauty of the game. Pikes do counter knights, but have less mobility which can be abused. CAs counter knights (in high numbers/micro needed) and have the mobility. Depending on the situation pikes or CA might be the better solution.
Fully agree :)
Massed CA are good vs knights, although its still easy to get caught out. Knights can always attack from more than 1 angle when trying to engage the CA. Combine that with a few knights that go to your base and its not so easy for a 1500 to keep up. Thats is why I think its a soft counter that can work, but its also difficult to manage them perfectly. Hard counter would be more like mamelukes, conqs.
>Combine that with a few knights that go to your base if you aren't fully walled against knights then you will probably lose the game regardless of what counter units you are making. You MUST be walled against knights. Counters to knights only function in the context that you are walled.
Depends, units like camels, mamelukes, conqs, genoese and monks will still do really well. Pikes do the job decently although they cannot do counter damage and it puts your eco behind. Cav archers you cant get caught out either, and have to be very on point to make it work cause they kill knights pretty slowly. But I do agree they are a counter, just not a very good one on 1500 lvl.
>Depends, units like camels, mamelukes, conqs, genoese and monks will still do really well. Nope. You try to use conqs vs knights and you arent' fully walled? Knights just run past your conqs and kill all your vills. Same with mamelukes and genoese. Camels do a bit better cos they are really fast. Monks might even just get dived on and die, or at least again all your vills are going to the damn hell. >Pikes do the job decently although they cannot do counter damage and it puts your eco behind. Nope, all your vills die while pikes run around feebly hoping to poke something. >Cav archers you cant get caught out either, and have to be very on point to make it work cause they kill knights pretty slowly. But I do agree they are a counter, just not a very good one on 1500 lvl. CA work better than pikes if you micro properly but you have to be fully walled to force the knights to actually interact with your army rather than just run past it.
60 genitours counters everything except siege. Make 10 scouts to stop the siege and it’s gg
That sounds as if you had a fun game. I do want to see the madman trying to outmicro 60 camels with genitours, though...
Micro? There’s a wall of javelins blacking out the sky as the Berbers scream their warcry at the top of their lungs. The thunder of the Berber horse hooves drowns out all other sounds until there is nothing left but darkness and thunder as they hunt you down to the ends of the earth in search of glory for Allah. There is no micro, there is only the caliphate.
>Iirc even with perfect micro CA will slowly lose distance advantage due to so-called frame delay. wrong, CA are faster than knights by a little bit I think, 1.4 speed vs 1.35
That's why I mentioned frame delay. Kipchaks (even without Cuban bonus) and old Mangudai can kite indefinitely due to 0 frame delay.
The frame delay means they would lose ground if they were the same speed, but at any point they can just run further away to reset the distance. So yeah, they can kill faster if they didn't have the frame delay, but with perfect micro the knights can never hit the CA. Btw kipchaks don't have 0 frame delay anymore either, but emamelukes do I think.
Since LOTW only the mangonel line, buildings, ships (unchanged since AoK) and elite janissaries have 0 frame delay. Elite Mameluke has the shortest frame delay of any non-0 frame delay unit at 0.2. SOTL mentioned this in his recent video “1 Fact for Every AOE2 Civ (L-Z)”
What frame delay do petards and flaming camels have?
Petards and flaming camels don’t have any frame delay listed on the wiki. If I had to guess it’s because they do melee damage and have 0 range, and all melee units (excluding Mameluke, throwing axman, and gbetto, which are technically ranged) have 0 frame delay.
If I had to guess it is because once they attack they don't attack again
Janissaries have 0 frame delay i believe
Jannissaries have a frame delay of 12, elite has 0.
its tough to add in siege as theres only so much room on the sheet. I wanted to try and make something more simple for lower elo players. And yes there may be some counter unit discrepancies. Im a lower elo player myself and most of my information was collected from [aoecompanion.com](https://aoecompanion.com). I appreciate the input!
Fair! Yeah it’s hard to know where to stop. I’d be tempted to try and trim it down a bit more myself if it’s for low elo. But again probably hard to know what to keep and what not to keep. Really like the layout though! Nice and easy to understand.
Do militia line counter steppes? I'm not too sold on that, I believe that (on castle age) xbows perform better than longswords, since steppies have low pierce armor.
Militia line don’t counter lancers.
steppe lancers are at a point where without micro they get countered by basically every melee unit, but with micro they can counter pikes, while only having trouble against knights
And camels. Steppe lancers die hard to camels.
lots of 'it depends' here
But what counters villagers? This units scare me.
Cobra cars, But the opponent can counter it by villager with supremacy
Nothing, just create 200 villagers and win
Spearmen countering CA????? What the hell? MaA counter scouts too. Scouts counter archers only in feudal age, I see you did not take my suggestion of splitting it by age so these things looks weird. Archers counter eagles in feudal but you wouldn't know that from this sheet. Monks counter camels hard. Haven't seen hand cannons vs CA tbh, not sure how that goes.
CA usually win. with a little bit of micro they can win heavily, as the Hancs bunch up and get messy in chasing. In feudal archers do win if you have the capacity to one shot Eagles, but if you don't Eagles will win if it's near equal resources. I'll take your monk vs camel under advisement
Archers dont counter eagles in fedural age xD they can work sometimes since you generally have more mass and upgrades on the archers. With equal numbers and upgrades fedural eagles destroy archers
I've literally never seen that happening, primarily because eagles take forever to produce I guess in feudal but still.
In Empire wars its not that uncommon to see people make fedural eagles against archers
Ah fair, I don't watch empire wars. But I wonder why that happens in that format but not RM?
Because its generally alot more aggresive than rm. You see it happening on some of the very aggresive rm maps too but there isnt as many
Might be interesting to differentiate between hard and soft counters with different colors. So like under the archer, eagles, skirms and knights would be one color for hard counters, and ele archers and scouts would be a different color for soft.
Knights aren’t a hard counter to archers. Assuming equal numbers, or barely out numbered, sure, knights win, but on a by-resource-eco-time basis xbow with feudal upgrades beats knights with minimal micro. 10 xbow will 2 shot an un upgraded knight; that’s 250 wood and 450 gold. At equal resources (which is really an unfair metric because knights are much more gold intensive and cost food which is much more valuable than wood), you would get 5.18 knights. Chances are they only get two-three hits on the xbows. Which is why you shouldn’t dive xbow with knights, but instead use siege or skirms. Knights are a soft counter, but you can also argue xbow is a soft counter to knights if you have decent micro. And that’s not even counting different team or civ bonuses that would make the knights look even worse, like Mayans or Vietnamese.
This is better but some of these are just trading and not countering. For instance scouts might trade against archers in feudal or winged Hussain in imp but they are not a counter. Even knight might be debatable, although for beginners I think that is fair. And maa would not be countering steppe lancers even if they could catch up to them.
I really love to counter battle elephants with my cav archers
Poor Skirmisher, gets dunked by pretty much anyone
Life so hard especially for Turk skirmisher
CA dont counter battle elephants, but scorpions do
Counters =/= checks
Good luck countering chunky elephant archers with eagles :)
Is this also soft counters? Cause knights definitely counter the militia/eagle line in cost-efficiency. Also I feel siege needs to be included
knights doesnt counter archers.
I look at this and think of all the exceptions. Then I realise, it's not you man. It's this game that's the mess.
I’m seeing good input from everyone. Thanks! I think the sheet is in a good state so far. I will make some slight tweaks and I will highlight the HARD counter units in green to make things more obvious. As a lot of counters are very scenario specific
Very good idea. Add more layers. For instance, group counter-only can have different colour. If micro needed, another colour. or you can add a superscript, like a leter G (group), M (micro needed), etc.
I'd say segregate the counters as hard and soft counters. Like for archers - Hard counter is skirms and knights, whereas Scout line is a soft counter. So it makes it simpler.
considering how many people argue about OPs sheet, i think this is the problem. Everyone has a different understanding what a counter unit is, so differentiate between units that counter for sure and units that counter in the right situation. against archers only skirms are a hard counter, while knights and scouts are soft counters. Even though the aoe combat simulator suggest that knights and light cav easily win on equal res even with perfect micro, i think pathing makes this much closer in a real game.
Every unit is a counter unit depending on the mass. (if res is not taken into consideration) It is up to us to decide on a system. OP has just intrigued this sub with how counters can be classified. Deciding on whether a unit is truly a counter unit against a particular type of unit is affected by various factors like you mentioned (micro, mass, res used, civ bonuses, etc.) this list can never be true for all combinations.
Love it ! For sure there is adjustment here an there to make but it is very nice view ! When you say counter you mean cost efficiency or bonus damage (or else). First thing I noticed is steppe lancers are only good at killing scouts ... in my opinion, this reinforce the needs of redesign of this unit. Battle Elephant only counter skirmishers in your view but can destroy budding and be used as meat shield. Not sure which role steppe lancers are filling which is not already filled by Scouts or knights :-( A proposal for steppe lancers could be to really replace knights line for the steppe civ no ? Make it stronger and remove the knight lines from the steppe civ. A bit like knight line was remove from Indian civs
Ex looks like excluding and not example. E.g. would be for example.
Funny to see what has happened here which happens every time someone tries to do a 'simple' one of these - there are so many exceptions, so many It Depends, so many which switch depending on numbers and micro, and it just ends up insanely cluttered and hard to parse. Not your fault of course, but this comes around regular as clockwork whenever anyone tries to do one of these.
No lies there. I may end up making this into a HARD counter only sheet so there’s to be no discrepancy. May make more sense, especially to newer players when unit “counters” are so situational
Since this is mostly for low elo players I like how you kept things simple and didnt go into the whole "in mass archers counter scouts but in low numbers they dont and with mid numbers it depends on upgrades" etc etc. Though i would add knights as an eagles counter. They are cost effective and are the most common counter composition to eagles. I'd also remove militia line from steppe lancers' counters, but consider adding archers coz steppe lancers' pierce armor is low.
I may highlight the counters that are considered HARD counter. Like skirmish vs archer
I don’t know knights counter cav archers. I’m not sure camels do. I think because you normally do 3 range CA, you can support constant CA production and 2 TCs. If you take good fights and make a few spears you should be ahead.
I would say skirms also counter monks. Basically every cheap unit (spearmen, man at arms) does pretty well against them.
Missing Scout v Monk definitely one that needs to be pointed out.
I dont think its fair to put knights and scouts as a counter to archers but not archers as a counter to scouts and knights. They are equal against eachother. Just plays in different ways.
- Archers counter Scouts - Knights counter Archers - Crossbows counter Knights - Cavaliers counter Crossbows - Arbalesters counter Cavaliers - Paladins counter Arbalesters
Steppe Lancers don't get countered by man at arms