How to beatFrenchas Macedonian

Arbalétriers have 7 melee armor, so Macedonian spearmen with 10 damage barely scratch them.

Nest of Bees from Foreign Engineering Company is the answer to French Arbalétriers for Macedonians.

You might be wondering why would you ever do Imperial Hippodrome against French? You don't want to build horsemen against knights. Actually, you want to build spears against those knights because Macedonians have some of the best spears to scale anyway, but obviously your opponent wants to put archers. So you just have to think of it as you're reversing the order of the counter play. It's like you're getting the horsemen to potentially deal with the archers.

If French are trading knights into spears, it's because they don't want to end the game early; they want to drag it out and Chivalry will make them better down the line.

Usually the wallup timing is you go double horsemen, you have the Hip Scout come out and you start harassing villagers, but French is kind of an exception there because the knights are just exceptional at contesting that.

The Ridari champion can take down two knights and barely costs more than a standard knight, around 300 resources to respawn.

Scaling archers is toxic later in the game because if you leverage stone and get Mangonel Towers, you can get plus six damage on those things. When you see French going all Arbalétrier, Mangonel Towers become your best friend.

Bogmaðr struggles against Arbalétrier. Horsemen might be the best answer.

Arbalétrier can only deploy Pavise once and then it's on cooldown, so you can just pull back.

Adding Varangian Guards alongside Ridari is a good idea against Arbalétriers, even if counterintuitive, to keep the Ridari alive.

Varangians in long feudal age can go up to six melee armor. Knights still do decent damage against them, but once there's only knights, you can realistically activate berserking and they will trade incredibly well with berserking against the knights.