How to beat
Maliansas Holy Roman Empire
Matchup tips
Donso in Dark Age are quite expensive. While they have the extra range throw, HRE gets to take the fights with extra mobility.
As HRE, putting up your own outpost on the Malian gold is worthwhile. It forces them to get gold elsewhere, limiting their Sofa and Javelin Thrower production, as they rely heavily on pit mine and passive income, struggling to get enough gold for their needs.
Against Malians, just slow them down; you don't need to kill anything. Making them invest in things that aren't cows gives you a leg up.
Before blacksmith upgrades, Sofa have only three armor against eight damage from archers, so they take a lot of damage.
Sitting under the TC and killing all the cattle denies Malians their passive food income.
Malians tend to respond to dark age rush by dropping an outpost on the gold, a mill next to it, and gathering sheep there. They jump into the outpost when spearmen arrive, minimizing idle time and protecting the gold.
We've seen this with HRE: if you get enough archers, the javelin throwers don't matter. The attack upgrade from Meinwerk comes in so fast that you have a small window where the javelin thrower armor is negated by the extra damage.
You could just spam archers because what is the counter to archers for Malians? It's javelins, but that requires gold. And he's going to be capped at being able to afford like what? Maybe four javelins max a minute.
In a 1v1 against the Malians, going for Dark Age Spearman pressure might prove to be beneficial — they want to spend their wood on houses and age up, they don't necessarily want a production building.
Malians Unique Units
Malians Landmarks
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