How to beatMaliansas Byzantine

With Fort of the Huntress, Malians can have stealth units right in front of the Byzantine base.

Byzantines can open double houses against Malians, using the bonus 8 stone from finishing a 2x2 building to afford their first Cistern without sending villagers to stone, because Malians won't have aggression for the first six minutes.

Byzantines can get a sub-4 minute age up with four villagers on the landmark, using the early Cistern's 10% gather rate boost, and potentially go for a quick mercenary timing push against Malians, though a Malian with double back gold spawn can resist it.

Elite Limitanei (Byzantine spearmen) are very effective against Malian Sofas.

When facing Malian Sofa raids, Byzantines can produce a few Limitanei at home to defend while keeping their main army on the offensive.

The Golden Horn Tower's ability to queue up free longbows allows Byzantines to rapidly remass military after losing a fight.

The window for Malians to punish Byzantines is when they have to make the olive grove transition.

Cataphracts are significantly weakened by poison damage from Malian archers, especially with Painted Shields giving them 7 pierce armor, making poison one of the few effective damage sources.

And it's one of those matchups, one of those situations where Byzantines are able to keep up with the Malian cattle economy quite well, even when just on one TC, courtesy of having the cistern levels, courtesy of getting all the olive oil in, the passive unit generation from the golden horn tower and all that good stuff.

B actually went for the javelins which we more commonly see the longbows but it makes a lot of sense when you think about it. Similarly as against the French, these javelins will be able to deal with poison archers very effectively and later the camel riders in castle age will make pretty swift work of those sofa.

I think you're better off just making horsemen really. I would have loved to see some horsemen from B in this case. I mean if you can brute force through with just Cataphracts then that's ideal, but when your numbers get low, when you lose the mass, then Cataphracts aren't that impressive anymore. And as you mentioned, so expensive in gold, probably just better off making a whole bunch of horsemen here. They're not going to do great against Musofadi, but they're not going to get countered either.

Limitanei just rushing in because there's no actual counter to them here. The javelins are terrible at clearing them away.

The nightmare fuel of every Malian player. Cheirosiphon are disgusting for cow kills because they kill the ranch and then they kill the cow. They do the full cook in one.

Byzantines definitely have the ability to stick it out up against a civilization like the Malians, which have so many passive resources going for themselves, so much passive income going for themselves, but they can stick it out typically on one TC where other civs have to opt for a second TC just to play it even.

Once you get that Golden Horn Tower with five cisterns in, you just produce so many units that you're able to outmass the Malian cattle food economy or just pretty much anything that Malians can really throw at you.

With the Hippodrome, your horses now give you a little bit more value when they get a villager kill or two. ... it does produce a bit of a reactionary play that is going to cost Malians quite a bit and does delay their eco a bit because every production building you force Malians to make just ensures that Malian's boom goes a little bit slower.

It's kind of difficult like going for javelin throws as Byzantines up against the Malians because they'll just make more.

You don't want Keshik, because Keshik feels weird into Sofa and Musofadi.

One Cheirosiphon is always going to feel better than one ram, maybe even two rams, because of how easy it is to target onto targets. Where it gets very interesting is if you have a look at the Malian's pit mine set up, there's so much clumped buildings there that if you find the right spot you can basically burn two, three, I think once I've seen four buildings all at once, and those huts aren't tanky.

The most simple counter to mass javelins is mass spears, and it's even better because it's Limitanei, right? So you're also reducing the damage more.