How to beat
Frenchas Holy Roman Empire
Matchup tips
If the French go for an early outpost, HRE can send one villager to get a counter outpost up on the other side of the gold vein – that makes the situation a lot more terrible because the French will have invested 100 wood and still be denied off the gold. If it's just a spearman, the French could mass gather gold with four or five villagers, get enough gold for fast feudal age, get some archers, and take control over the gold again. But if you invest into an outpost and get counter outpost rushed, the transition into fast feudal archer play is much harder or significantly delayed.
The Burgrave has been changed: you now do 50% bonus damage when charging with infantry. That means Castle Age men-at-arms with the upgrades completely shred knights.
In a situation where you're heavily committed to feudal age, if you got Burgrave ready, you get a pretty good window to clean the French army and then they age up without military.
Burgrave is a great tempo play: it's not just the speed on the production, but also the speed on the upgrades that you are going to be getting in – being able to get the mace upgrade and the two-handed upgrade on the men-at-arms at a very very quick pace.
You get some really really strong upgrades for your spearman and your knights as well. So you could in theory actually make a point here for a knight play for the Holy Roman Empire up against a knight civilization like the French.
If HRE ships get too close to the French Red Palace, they will get batterated.
The French Galleass is way stronger than springald ships but way more expensive as well.
In low numbers, horsemen and spears dominate archer-knight because archers cannot clear spears fast enough for knights to mop up horsemen. Once you reach critical mass to one-shot spears, knight archer takes the lead. As masses build further, you overkill spearmen, and the heavy blob from the horseman-spear player becomes advantageous again.
The longer you spend in feudal age against the French, the further you fall behind.
Spear horsemen makes a lot of sense against French. You use your superior economy to flood as many units as possible. Even though you don't have a straight answer to knights outside of spearmen, you can flood so many units that even though the knight-archer composition is micro-wise easier, you have enough units to push past that and get effective trades once you surround the archers.
French knight scaling feels better in a prolonged feudal, whereas HRE traditionally wants to reach Castle Age before around 15 minutes due to the relic win condition.
HRE is a timing civ that peaks a lot faster. Once that timing passes, French late-game units like Royal Bloodlines horsemen, Arbalétrier (the best crossbows), and French knights make the game very scary for HRE.
French Unique Units
French Landmarks
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