The AI seems to love pumping out this unit and I can understand why, my armies of 250+ strength were being mopped up by 150 strength armies of Mongol Horde units with ease and barely taking any casualties at all.

When you fight them they always appear to have the first turn, whether you attacked them or they attacked you, I have no idea what decides this. In that first turn I would just sit there and watch 1/4 - 1/2 of my army die while they ride around slinging arrows all over the place without provoking any attacks since they are ranged units. Generally at this point my combat strength is nowhere near what it was to begin with.

My instant reaction was "Oh these horse archers are really strong, the counter to cavalry is Spearmen so I will start using those" that didn't go well at all. My spearmen were taking roughly double the damage of what they were putting out after trying to attack them. Even more advanced units like chariots were almost being killed off in a single attack from the Mongol Hordes and taking little to no damage from a chariot attack.

I ended up being granted the opportunity to get some Musketeers I think they were via a decision popup. It wasn't until I got this unit that I had finally found a unit that can go even with the Mongol Horde units in terms of damage and survivability, I'm not sure when it all happens in terms of time line but Musketeers appear to me to be a far more advanced unit than the Mongol Horde cavalry units so having them only just break even in terms of power feels really awful. In the end I just quit the run at about 130 turns because the game became unplayable due to it being flooded with this single unit with nothing to stop it.

Knights are what I had to use to counter the bastards. I am interested to hear what strategies others have deployed against them. 

I just finished a war against them. Definitely feel less scary without the extra attack but still scary. I was able to beat them with an army of Shotelai and archers. I think I was able to beat them in two ways. First was I chose the Hittites first that plus professional soldiers civic meant all my units had +2 combat strength. Second, the shotelai is probably a good unit against the Mongols as it should limit their movement with grappler. Even with this, there was quite a bit of attrition against the Mongols until I unlocked crossbowmen.

Also I had more success when the Mongol hoard would siege my cities and I would then send my army into the battlefield. The Mongol A.I. would target the defender units inside the city (probably because their base combat strength is lower) while my shotelai would get good flanking bonuses.

Solatel are pretty good against them. 

I was going to write this too, but then I thought, well it's historical so what is there to complain about. Knights (and castles) were indeed the counter in real life.

FWIW, I had a 4 stack - 2 elephants and 2 Babylonian spearmen. They were able to take out single Mongol archers but still ended with enough damage that they had to retreat to safety. Worst of all was when they retreated to safety in a castle (even though they were the ones to attack me, they had a safe castle in their half). I couldn't attack them at all with my horsemen.

The elephants were actually pretty good 1 on 1 (on downhill they were close to killing it in one shot); but as you said, it's the first mover advantage that really saps your strength.

EnviiXD wrote:

my armies of 250+ strength were being mopped up by 150 strength armies of Mongol Horde units with ease and barely taking any casualties at all.

The (not-so)funny thing is that the UI tells you "your army is stronger", then you choose manual battle and end mopped up. But if you reload and choose auto battle, because if the game is so sure you are stronger please show me, you lose the battle anyway.

EnviiXD wrote:

In that first turn I would just sit there and watch 1/4 - 1/2 of my army die while they ride around slinging arrows all over the place without provoking any attacks since they are ranged units. Generally at this point my combat strength is nowhere near what it was to begin with.

Yes, the first lesson with Mongols, Huns and other ranged units armies is that you should attack first. I think it's a balancing issue, not very easy to solve, but the way the combat system is designed ranged units have a very big advantage when starting a battle. If they attack first they can kill half your army, and if you start the battle the ranged units can defend just as good as any unit, so it's a win-draw situation for them.

Veah wrote:

EnviiXD wrote:

my armies of 250+ strength were being mopped up by 150 strength armies of Mongol Horde units with ease and barely taking any casualties at all.

The (not-so)funny thing is that the UI tells you "your army is stronger", then you choose manual battle and end mopped up. But if you reload and choose auto battle, because if the game is so sure you are stronger please show me, you lose the battle anyway.

EnviiXD wrote:

In that first turn I would just sit there and watch 1/4 - 1/2 of my army die while they ride around slinging arrows all over the place without provoking any attacks since they are ranged units. Generally at this point my combat strength is nowhere near what it was to begin with.

Yes, the first lesson with Mongols, Huns and other ranged units armies is that you should attack first. I think it's a balancing issue, not very easy to solve, but the way the combat system is designed ranged units have a very big advantage when starting a battle. If they attack first they can kill half your army, and if you start the battle the ranged units can defend just as good as any unit, so it's a win-draw situation for them.

Honestly? Considering how horse riders actually are IRL...
I would just make Mongol's squisher.
Have them take extra damage or something like that.
They are fast, mobile and does a lot of damage without retaliation.
That means that when they do take damage it SHOULD punish them severely.

xathos wrote:

Massed crossbows / pikes, basically, and gunpowder units as soon as you can get those. A good rule of thumb is that you can maybe effectively kill horse horse archers using massed ranged units and/or cavalry, and enough infantry and/or fortifications to shield your ranged units so they don't all die. And you'll need to outnumber them ~3x, with era equivalent units (spears / archers are classical era units and mongol hordes are powerful medieval EUs, so those spears will not hold up at all in combat against them as I'm sure you're aware). It'll be necessary to fight dirty and use underhanded tactics (like attacking isolated units, completely surrounding an army and destroying each unit one by one, and, generally, aiming to always get in the first strike, and completely annihilate all deployed units (and/or block reinforcements)), b/c if you're fighting huns / mongols on an open field and they manage to deploy 6-8+ units, your entire army is probably as good as dead unless you have a tech or CS advantage and/or are sitting on fortifications and/or choke points.

Are huns / mongols invincible though? No. Crossbows / pikes can deal pretty effectively kill hunnic horse archers, and arquebusiers, musketeers, and best of all line infantry / dragoons will completely shred mongols, so the key is almost always to aim for a tech advantage and/or EUs that give you a CS advantage (the khmer / mughal elephant units are great), or yeah the sholetel would be great due to its ability to lock down movement.

If you don't have a tech advantage, and have archers / spearmen against mongols, my best bit of advice would be to just hide in your cities, built up fortifications, rush the crossbow / pike tech ASAP, and build archers, spears, and bank gold to upgrade them as soon as you have the tech. Even then I wouldn't recommend going on the offensive unless you can have a localized 2-3x numeric advantage and/or a strong EU (like the khmer / mugal elephant units), or a tech advantage (ie. gunpowder units). Sending archers / spears to fight mongols without a massive numeric advantage is pretty much suicide and a waste of pops and/or gold, although yes knights are powerful enough to reliably kill mongols en masse, and horsemen are strong enough to kill hunnic horse archers, and both of those are a very good reason to build up and keep around a bunch of scouts w/ exp, since you can upgrade those directly into horsemen and knights.

That said, there are a few cheese tactics you can use. If you have a forward-ish city with good cliff-based chokepoints (and a few holes that the mongols / huns could run through), you can seal off a few of those w/ some carefully placed garrison districts. Huns / mongols, as horse units, can't move through garrisons, so you can in some cases setup a kill zone that allows you to kill them with mass ranged units that are either completely unassailable, or where you force them to attack you one by one through a narrow chokepoint.

Although 'one by one' against the huns / mongols is dangerous, b/c any competent opponent using them (and the AI isn't exactly always competent, although it is sometimes) can attack you 6 times with 6 horse archers even through only a single tile, by cycle-attacking you through that gap, and if that's capable of breaking through whatever defensive line you have setup, and if you have squishy ranged units behind that, then you'll be pretty hosed.

In general the weakness of the horde horse archers is that they're mounted (can't enter walled districts and garrisons) and have limited range. (so if you have a cliff separating you from horse archers, and a chokepoint you can hold, any other units should not be standing on that cliff unless you want them to die (and/or act as bait to lure away attacks from your other units)

Their strength however is that they're mounted units (ie. ignore zoc) and can always move after firing (and I'm pretty sure the huns can still attack twice?), so they can always find, attack and exploit the weakest point on your line and should absolutely not be fought on an open field if you have any exposed squishy, and valuable units that could die in a hit or two. 

And yeah, huns / mongols are pretty imba, but that's intentional, and... well, it makes sense historically lol.

Adding to this, ofc huns / mongol horse archer units can:

1. be produced normally w/ production
2. be produced w/out any production (any outpost w/ 4 pop can turn that pop into 4 horde horse archer units, and any city with ≥ 4 pop can raise 4 militia units, move them to an outpost, disband, and re-raise as horse archers)
3. produce more of themselves through pillaging (takes a while, but if you left a bunch of them alone somewhere (and weren't playing against an AI), this could become a bit of a problem)

The flipside though, is that anyone playing as huns / mongols takes some pretty serious hits to expansion and thus city growth (can't attach new outposts), doesn't get any FIMS bonuses, EQs, etc., and will generally fall behind in whatever era they're playing in unless they use their overwhelming military advantage to conquer half the world to grab territory for future expansions, vassals, and/or gold income from reparations and/or pillaging. They're also choices that make sense for underdogs and anyone who had been previously falling behind in, b/c they turn things that you likely have at least some of (ie pop) into powerful military units that could turn the game around for you (as you don't need production, you don't need money, and you don't need science, unlike all other powerful EUs that require tech halfway up your tech tree to unlock). But there's obviously a bit of risk involved, b/c if your new powerful military units don't work out, you'll likely be left even further behind than you were before (due to burning pops on now dead military units, etc).

So it's balanced in that sense.

Lastly, on the off chance that you were totally behind and losing a war against the mongols, one thing that you could do as a last resort would be to just surrender and voluntarily be vassalized, and then build up your economy, military, etc., while benefitting from all their strategics, and generally biding your time until you're strong enough to rebel (or just win the game as a vassal, which is probably technically possible).

Your argument for the huns / Mongols make sense.
(aka them being a good way to catch up and for underdogs etc)
The issue however, is that nothing REALLY stops them from just being picked by the guy that took like Olmec's early on and spread around and attached as much of territory as possible early, and then switched to an intense military focus with huns and then Mongol.
I just think that Mongol is a BIT too sturdy for what they are.
They should take quite heavy damage, to make up for their mobility and ranged status.

Spamming anti cavalry units, using ranged units and garrison help alot when fighting the hordes.

Tnecniw wrote:

Your argument for the huns / Mongols make sense.
(aka them being a good way to catch up and for underdogs etc)
The issue however, is that nothing REALLY stops them from just being picked by the guy that took like Olmec's early on and spread around and attached as much of territory as possible early, and then switched to an intense military focus with huns and then Mongol.

Yeah, but the thing is that someone who goes olmecs -> huns -> mongols will be able to completely conquer the map and will likely have complete military dominance for the first three eras of the game... but whatever power they have will falloff, hard, in early modern / industrial / contemporary. And yeah, sure they could use this to snowball hard into the later eras, but assuming that they've vassalized and not -eliminated- all the other players, the game will still very much be in play and the game could turn on them pretty easily - which would be neat b/c it would mirror how the hunnic and mongol empires (incl vassals) were established IRL, but which slowly to very quickly fell apart in later eras as their military advantages became obsolete.

In a human game pretty much anyone who tries to pull this off will have most of the world turn against them. and the AI can pull this off against other AIs, but a human player can use garrison exploits (and exploit their lack of foresight to also bring other melee / ranged units to sieges), and if you're fighting an AI who's vassalized the rest of the world that just makes the game a bit more challenging :)

olmecs -> huns -> mongols is actually a really weak legacy choice for late game, unless you then grab OP cultures to follow up with like joseon, mughals, french, etc. b/c you won't have much if any science, production, or pops, and will be limited to whatever's in the cities you conquer as well as any districts / infrastructure / etc in your cities at home

olmecs -> huns -> umayyads would be a much stronger choice since you could roll rapid territorial expansion directly into science, but has its own set of weaknesses as the umayyads aren't that strong militarily, so you'd be relying on leftover hunnic hordes until you could get gunpowder units, and obviously that frees up someone else to then pick mongols

A much stronger play would actually be something like egyptians -> celts -> mongols -> joseon (where you focus on building up your own cities, burn pops for mongol hordes to rapidly expand and/or beat back other players once cheap mercs start getting obsolete, and then translate your territorial gains (on coastlines) directly into science, and/or focus some of your cities on science to catch back up b/c you'll be massively behind on science at this point. the critical part of this is this'd just allow you to focus on building up your own districts, pops, and infrastructure without wasting production / pops on military units, and you wouldn't really need much science (for military techs) until early modern since you could rely on mercs and hordes). 

But then the -problem- with this strategy is then that it's very brittle: it requires getting specific culture choices -first-, and if you're rushing towards those you'll miss out on opportunities to a) fully build up / exploit your EQs, b) miss out on a lot of fame, which is actually a pretty great way to balance out the game. (any player who's massively ahead but rushed through earlier eras will have to slow down and spend more time in later eras, ie. start to fall behind other players that are free to advance faster if they have more fame banked up)

That said, yeah I agree that making horse archers squishier on defense could be a good way to make them a bit more balanced / counterable... unless the goal is to just have them completely overrun the game whenever they show up and be really hard to counter (if so, they're pretty much working as intended)

The one dev change that I'm a bit concerned about is that you couldn't completely eliminate another player early in the game in victor (just take almost all of their territories or vassalize them); in the current beta you can, and that throws a lot of the late game balance out the window if a hun / mongol player could just kill everyone by medieval. Hopefully the devs revert that (or that's a bug), b/c while annoying, the inability to completely eliminate other players early in the game seemed like an important bit of game balance (and to make games more interesting) in pvp games.

Although eh... actually if they just made this a map / game option that'd be fine, and would probably give us the best of both worlds if you wanted to play an extermination playthrough or w/e (in which case yes huns / mongols would be OP)

TLDR; some cultures are very imbalanced, but since they're all imbalanced in different ways and have strengths and weaknesses, and this could lead to interesting, pretty dynamic games with massive power spikes and swings in map control (unlike civ...). And there's actually some balance in culture picks / snipes (that can ruin someone's strategy), and fame (rushing through eras to grab certain cultures is very powerful, but means you'll potentially need to stay longer in later eras to make up for lost fame, which is a pretty neat mechanic to balance early aggression and early / late game play)

for example: if that one hunnic player is in the lead and wrecking everyone else, someone else could grab mongols first to beat them back. if they're massively in the lead w/ olmecs –> huns –> mongols, and have so far dominated the entire early game, in a pvp game everyone else could troll them by advancing first to snipe all the really strong early modern cultures that'd help them catch back up on food / industry / science (which would almost certainly leave them hilariously far behind by industrial / contemporary, and at risk of losing everything if the other players can build up armies of mid / late game units first to take back their cities and/or unvassalize themselves)