How to beatRusas Ayyubid

I would expect a seasoned player would not go for the eco- wing here. It's probably going to be the dervish wing. You want to get your dervishes out in feudal. With that, you're putting yourself so much further ahead in terms of being able to respond to any feudal aggression, being able to do a little bit of feudal aggression yourself, but you're up against Rus. And Rus does have that ability to just kind of stay under their TC and go fast castle.

There is a barracks coming in for Rus, but barracks up against desert raiders whenever they switch over to the ranged mode, the spearmen just kind of look at it and go, 'Well, my spear's too short. I can't reach.' The ranged damage isn't that much, but they can just kite for days and you don't have healing as Rus.

Having the Camel Lancer, you just deny so much potential damage from a civilization like the Rus that just wants to pump those cavalry units. And it used to be that with 12 pierce damage, the aura would reduce the damage to like 10 something, 9.6. But now because the damage is already lower, it's going to be going all the way down, making cavalry archers a lot worse against the camel lancers.

Only eight damage – with that type of math even Desert Raiders can actually have a good exchange with Horse Archers at range, which is pretty depressing.

But we have seen Ayyubids do really, really well against them with a very specific build, notably going for that military wing reinforcement in the castle age and just straight up playing desert raiders against horse archers and winning outright because of that.