What is the best counter for horse archers harassment?

[Monarch]

Regular archers? obviously spears cant catch up.

[TheDiaper]

Walls

[Plastic Master]

mass regular achers bcse horse archers have low range.
Mangudais will be countered pretty easily.
However, if the Rus reaches imperial, they will get 2 extra range upgrade and it will get hard to counter. Therefore, sieges like mangonel, springalds and cannons or culverins counter horse archers easily.

Currently, the Rus horse archers are broken and should be fixed in the next update. It is considered as one of the OP units.

[ARCAGNELL0]

When people say the Horse Archer is broken, and that nothing really counters it cost effectively, they're not all that biased, as the unit is, by definition, actually broken.

Horse Archers currently fire around twice as fast as they're supposed to due to an animation bug, they can also benefit from animation cancel to fire even faster AND they also get a 40% damage increase from Flaming Arrows because the tech applies TWICE instead of once.

Archers are supposed to be a cost effective counter, especially in Castle Age, but that does not happen by a long shot due to HA's massively bugged rate of fire.

Chinese get access to Zhuge-Nu, which have almost 3 times the DPS of a standard archer making it rather effective at dealing with them. Spamming mangonels is also a viable choice since their low hit points can make them quite susceptible. Horsemen (and fire lancers by extension) also deal bonus damage against ranged units, of which HA are part of, but the possible micro can negate most of their effectiveness.

The two most effective counters to Horse Archer + Scout spam are Keeps, Outposts, Stone Walls and Ranged Infantry on stone walls.

Scout Rus out and make sure he's going for horse archers. Invest in some stone walls where's he's most likely to strike, if not outright fully wall your entire base off. Keep mining stone and chopping wood, boom like a madman and then take map control with outposts
and more walls to negate his mobility advantage and spot his artillery before he can spot yours.

[Cacomistle]

Horse archers are kind of overpowered. Regular archers and siege are probably the 2 best counters to them, but neither of them are really a counter (probably add spears too to deal with the scouts faster).

As such I think the 2 best counters to horse archer play right now are to
A: kill them in feudal (as in like skip pro scouts and go full aggression)
B: play really greedy in feudal.
I'd personally say A>B.

Both of these put you at risk of just losing to rus in feudal (since rus feudal is by no means weak), but better to play in a hard position in feudal than to go in on even footing against horse archers.

I think most rus players just blind fc anyways so if you catch them off guard with an allin push you'll probably just kill them. If you get a rus who knows what they're doing rather than blindly doing the same thing every game, you're probably losing either way.

[Monarch]

Originally posted by Plastic iZ Da wAe!:

mass regular achers bcse horse archers have low range.
Mangudais will be countered pretty easily.
However, if the Rus reaches imperial, they will get 2 extra range upgrade and it will get hard to counter. Therefore, sieges like mangonel, springalds and cannons or culverins counter horse archers easily.

Currently, the Rus horse archers are broken and should be fixed in the next update. It is considered as one of the OP units.

Got it. In a way, regular archers are like the skirms from AOE2

[Monarch]

Originally posted by Tawm:

Walls.

I've never successfully countered cavalry archers with foot archers, the cavalry archers just run away. Grenadiers are an exception because if the horses pause for a second they are all dead. Mangonels are good, cavalry if not too many horse archers.

Yes, idk why so many decide to not wall AT ALL against mongols or rus and expect no offensive. that said, some maps are way too open or nearly impossible to wall completely, or takes too long to wall everything.

[ARCAGNELL0]

The more I see people finally agreeing on spamming walls to counter cav spam, the happier I feel about my choice of maining the Chinese :P

[Boutus]

Throw a blight grenade at their feet.

[ARCAGNELL0]

Originally posted by Boutus:

Throw a blight grenade at their feet.

Make sure to have some accuracy and blight chance trinkets on your Plague Doctor tough!

[Boutus]

Originally posted by ARCAGNELL0:

Originally posted by Boutus:

Throw a blight grenade at their feet.

Make sure to have some accuracy and blight chance trinkets on your Plague Doctor tough!

Fellow 40k fan.

[ARCAGNELL0]

Originally posted by Boutus:

Originally posted by ARCAGNELL0:

Make sure to have some accuracy and blight chance trinkets on your Plague Doctor tough!

Fellow 40k fan.

I was actually referencing Darkest Dungeon, they've got a Plague Doctor with an attack called "Plague Grenade" in there too, that hits the two enemies in the back row and has a blight chance :P

WH40k works too tough :)

[mute all chat]

mangudai is the key if ure mongol
mass mangudai > mass rus's CA
but only with upgrades

[Cacomistle]

Originally posted by Mongoloid moment:

mangudai is the key if ure mongol
mass mangudai > mass rus's CA
but only with upgrades

They cost more with shorter range for lower dps and the same hp, and rus have better upgrades for horse archers than mongols do for mangudai, and rus can use scout front line which is the tankiest front line unit in the game per cost.

Maybe you can make something work just with how strong mongols are, but I wouldn't even count on that considering how good rus eco is specifically for fast castle builds. I honestly don't know how the matchup plays out since most high level streamers stopped playing mongols and they get banned constantly in tournaments, so maybe I'm wrong, but I feel they have significantly better options.

[mute all chat]

they have almost x2 fire rate, u cant hit and run vs mangudais, u have same unit stats
120 food is expensive, but 40 gold is nothing with mongol's 3rd age landmark, u have like same cost depended on ur eco bonuses

CA is good in hit and run, but u cant hit and run mangudais, in small amounts CA beats mangudais, but in large numbers it works well
i played a lot of tgs when rus was just goin fc, mass CA and tryin to kill everything without siege, and mangudais works well, sicha bows with stone is key upgrade if u wanna mass this, on full ups in castle age CA's and mangudais stats are same, mangudais dps higher bcs of fire rate and one difference is range. Use speedbuff with khan, because other buffs will be useless, nice players will just snipe khan.

castle age stats:
mangudai - CA
9 attack +2 sicha, +2 arrow | 12 +2 arrow
1.25 rate of fire | 2.00
105 hp | 85 hp +20 with boyars up
3.5 range | 4.5 range

its not best option for 1x1 maybe, im playing 2x2 mostly, but every time when i playin regular archers rus just turtling and waiting for imp, then goin for imp upgrades and add siege with this op range, with magudais i can just end this game, ruining his army, then his eco

[ARCAGNELL0]

Originally posted by Mongoloid moment:

they have almost x2 fire rate, u cant hit and run vs mangudais, u have same unit stats
120 food is expensive, but 40 gold is nothing with mongol's 3rd age landmark, u have like same cost depended on ur eco bonuses

CA is good in hit and run, but u cant hit and run mangudais, in small amounts CA beats mangudais, but in large numbers it works well
i played a lot of tgs when rus was just goin fc, mass CA and tryin to kill everything without siege, and mangudais works well, sicha bows with stone is key upgrade if u wanna mass this, on full ups in castle age CA's and mangudais stats are same, mangudais dps higher bcs of fire rate and one difference is range. Use speedbuff with khan, because other buffs will be useless, nice players will just snipe khan.

castle age stats:
mangudai - CA
9 attack +2 sicha, +2 arrow | 12 +2 arrow
1.25 rate of fire | 2.00
105 hp | 85 hp +20 with boyars up
3.5 range | 4.5 range

its not best option for 1x1 maybe, im playing 2x2 mostly, but every time when i playin regular archers rus just turtling and waiting for imp, then goin for imp upgrades and add siege with this op range, with magudais i can just end this game, ruining his army, then his eco

I'm not sure how you managed to beat HA with Mangudai, but Horse Archers have better DPS and range than Mangudai due to bugs right now, not to mention the fact that Imperial age gives them 2 more range and an upgrade providing double the bonus due to a bug.

This is crucial when you've got, say, more than 50 Horse Archers. In order to have all Mangudai fire with those numbers, you're going to need to litterally drive the blob into the enemy, while Horse Archers are going to be able to all fire at a good distance from the enemy right away, especially when they get 6.5 range in imperial, which by the way is only half a unit short of a Longbowman, just to keep things in perspective.

The Mangudai is probably the most balanced unique cavalry unit in the game, ironically. It's really, REALLY good at harassing eco but it's also very expensive while also costing gold. The Horse Archer only requires 120 resources to produce, of which none of it is gold, making it the strongest "trash unit" in the game; not to mention that Food and Wood are the two resources that Rus gather the fastest, possibly faster than all other civs besides HRE within Aachen influence or Chinese with supervision.

I would call Mangudai equal to Horse Archers at best right now, despite the latter being significantly cheaper than the former and scaling a lot worse into Imperial age.