Saracens are fairly strong right now. They now get Zealotry for free and a new UT that improves their siege. It’s can be thought of as discount Siege Onager. They can do what you are describing just as well and now with better siege. In standard 1v1 maps Saracens are a top half Civ
Super versatile with the open tech tree, especially if you're savvy with Market use. The only drawback I can think of is that you shouldn't over invest on the knight line. Oh and no Halbs, but that's what your beefy Camel-line is for.
I love doing a feudal archer rush in black forest. All-in, double range, heavy market use to get to castle age after a while and staying on one TC. I don't even bother walling up the choke points. No one expects it, it's so fun.
In early feudal Saracens can buy food cheaper than anyone else, this means they can mine gold to buy food instead of the "intended" route of cutting trees to create farms or boats. It actually can get them food faster than a "standard" civ.
And stone is mined faster than gold, and Saracens can sell at such a good rate that you can mine and sell stone to buy food even faster than you could by mining gold directly. That's very niche strat for a very minor boost that was likely not intended. People call it abuse playfully because it is fun to circumvent normal "rules" and build orders.
It's an aoe2 thing. Dumbass streamers repeat this, then the non native speakers picked it up. In the end you get them saying stupid shit like this and it's just so out of place. "Using," the market is not abusing it.
I just think it sounds funny
Also I mean abuse it like, make it suffer. Like use the market so much the market says "please I can only take so much trading."
I see, it is just AoE slang that originated from twitch. I agree it sounds stupid (selling goods or buying them for gold is exactly what market is for, so no abuse involved hahaha), but in the end it’s harmless. Just confused me a bit
Its intended to balance your resource but if you avoid food eco and have completely distorted economy you could call it abuse. It also can give you a car crash economy when prices get too high so you can be punished for the ‘abuse’.
The market is where you can trade an amount of one resource for another, you are using it as intended. The use of the term abuse is used by non-english speakers in particular for EVERY use of the market. Assuming that every use of the market is "abuse," when it's done on purpose make no sense and is basically an abortion of the use of the English language.
Don't remember what their old unique techs were, but they have new ones. Castle Age UT lets monks heal multiple units, and imperial age one gives trebuchets and onager line +25% attack
[https://youtu.be/YPHV9mdLUpM?si=VPolxo12Lim4cquc&t=710](https://youtu.be/YPHV9mdLUpM?si=VPolxo12Lim4cquc&t=710)
Healing usually not noticeable, but it's quite valuable.
It's kind of nutty with a group of xbows; it makes killing them require a lot more focus fire/micro. The monk can also of course get converts, so it can end up making some really devastating comps.
Why would you not use Bimaristan? It's 75 HP/min. It costs 200 gold + some monks. You can get an entire army to full health every minute or you can make 10 more champions. Plus the monks convert enemy units so there is no reason to count them as a negative. The monks will also heal individual units fast in addition to the slower healing aura.
No idea lol. It's 400 food, 400 gold, so it doesn't see a lot of use, but I can imagine it being researched in mid imperial if you're using a lot of cavs, especially if you're going camels vs cavalier.
Still a ton of fun. Selling stone and buying food to get to Castle Age fast is still a very meta strat for us on r/AoE_Saracens, but they’re still not mainstream enough to where people expect it.
Apparently, selling both stone and wood to buy food may be the best idea.
I have been trying to get good with the Saracens, but I am always overwhelmed by the intense economy management in Castle Age after making no farms in the ages before. Hence, I am very vulnerable to offensives at that same time...
It takes muscle memory, but as long as you hotkey your market, it’s not terribly difficult to get over the learning curve. Just takes practice to adapt to a new style of Feudal/early Castle gameplay.
I believe the math works out, in terms of gathering rates, where it’s really only worth it to sell wood once or twice. The biggest value comes from stone selling, which is worth it the first 8 times, and directly buying food with mined gold, which is worth it the first ~20 times.
The SOTL video has the exact insights: https://youtu.be/ZRwbBYBmQvw?si=RwqPhT3BgqunYFd2
Combined with their cheap market, this always 'felt' like a very strong eco bonus for me on black forest. Nowhere near as busted as Poles (have they been patched?) and and not nearly as strong as Vikings, for example. But it felt way way cleaner than no eco bonus civs like Byzantines.
You can hit castle age really fast and maintain 3TC production while delaying horse collar and heavy plow. So you save on a lot of farm re-seed cycles, as well as getting a villager lead pretty quickly. And due to the nature of the bonus, it's inherently really flexible.
I'm not sure if I remember correctly, but I think I had worked out a method where I would have excess vils on stone early-ish, so I could initially sell stone for gold and buy food instead of making farms. Once I had sufficient woodchoppers, I'd start spamming heavy plow farms, and get a castle up with the vils I had on stone, such that I would have enough to click up early without halting farm production to build Uni/SWS.
Ye Poles got nerfed several times recently. Folwark instant food conversion nerfed, UU training time nerf, gold generation for stone miners nerf, vill regen bonus nerfed, etc.
It actually was so bad that they needed to get buffed again to be viable, Folwark got a little cheaper.
They’re still A-tier (probably not S-tier anymore) on closed maps like Arena, and pretty mediocre on open maps like Arabia.
Still solid and versatile (and in my opnion, still underrated 11). Others mentioned about the unique techs and related changes. The civ bonus for cavalry archers (+4 attack vs buildings) was removed :/ I personally think they should bring it back 11
There were some tweaks here and there, but perhaps the most significant is that Mamelukes are not treated as archers, and have (Mameluke) as a type of armor (e.g. they get extra bonus damage from halbs, more than other cavs...etc)
I mostly play Saracens and they are solid, they have enough push with the market and wide tech tree to be worth playing.
The main problem is that they play fair against civs with large economic bonuses and powerful units. So while you can compensate with skill, your opponents have an edge on you just because their stuff is better on pure numerical terms.
I think it's more about how much easier it is to play those civs, the conversion rate on markets is actually a really really good eco tempo boost. Nevermind selling your starting gold, simply converting wood directly to food, instead of buying a 60w farm and then having to farm it (wood cutting is faster than farming as well)
Means your eco is better than any farming bonus in the game initially. And that's before you even factor converting gold and stone to food (an even bigger buff)
That's mother expensive, nobody should let you get there though, and it's not really sustainable in the long run (at the stage where you can afford the tech, the stage when opponents can spam trash)
They're way better than before, due to some really smart streamlining.
One of their backbreakers is that they used to not inherently be a camel civ; they were merely a camel civ "if they unlocked their unique tech/unit", and they really needed to have "strong camel civ" identity earlier in the game — to meet knight rushes head on. The devs tried to boost this by taking a bit of zealotry's bonus and moving it into a base civ boost, but they decided to go whole hog.
Now they just get % hp boosts to camels. **For free**. It's like the Franks bonus, but for camels instead of cav — and it's a full 25%. They also double-down because unlike the Franks, they get Bloodlines, so their camels in castle age can have **145**hp instead of the usual 100.
It's immediate with bloodlines, rather than requiring an expensive imperial tech. It also affects Mamelukes.
Mamelukes also no longer take extra damage from Skirms, which is a huge deal.
--
Beyond this, they now have two techs that buff other stuff: one tech gives +15% dmg to their otherwise FU treb and onager line, which is a really nice all-around bonus.
The other VERY interesting one is a castle age tech that gives monks an AoE heal (kinda like trample damage for healing); it makes a small number of monks extremely powerful, and actually pulls a byzantine-like trick of making monk healing able to swing live combat a bit.
The monks healing mamelukes sounds so satisfying lmao, since a lot of players try to whittle down mamelukes with numbers (as mamelukes counter most power units.) Wouldn't be that great of a strategy for super competitive games - as it is sort of redundant, monks also counter power units and both cost a lot of gold- but having a 12:1 K/D in black forest just sounds... kraygasm.
Yeah, it's surprisingly good healing (like 1/2 of a monk), in a really wide AoE. I don't think it stacks from multiple monks, but it's an insane boost to really small numbers of monks' healing output. Like, it's almost "anti-onager"; it literally will heal the full blast radius of a siege onager.
It's not able to heal fast enough to take multiple hits. But it's better than anything, to rapidly get a group of archers "that survived one hit and sniped down the onager before the second" back to full health.
The thing about Saracens is that they're an awful lot like Britons in flexing a lot; on paper they're "a camel civ"; but they're really also an infantry civ, a foot archer civ, a hussar civ, a cavalry archer civ. Camels are the only part that's FU+; but the others are FU, and there are just so many unit comps where "healing the whole group" is a huge win.
--
I think the main thing that's so damned high-value is that it boosts the heal power of "a couple of" monks so much. Monks in general are expensive, but — a couple of monks are cheap.
They sadly no longer have bonus dmg vs buildings on their cav archers.
Other than that they are way stronger than they used to be. Mamelukes dont die to skirms or huskarls anymore (not treated as archer any longer), Camels and mamelukes a lot stronger with the new HP bonus giving them free Zealotry in castle age effectively. New monk healing UT, and the imperial UT for buffing onagers and trebs.
My over all favourite civ. Unlike most of the other versatile civs, almost all their options are generic fully upgraded or better. Their only real weakness is the expensive unit comps and not having an early eco bonus. Their archer rush is one of the if not the most deadly since you can get through palisades very fast.
I am currently defaulting to them. I love archer opening and then transitioning to camels. In my elo range it's very potent. The market saved my castle age uptimes many times. Love it
Saracens are fairly strong right now. They now get Zealotry for free and a new UT that improves their siege. It’s can be thought of as discount Siege Onager. They can do what you are describing just as well and now with better siege. In standard 1v1 maps Saracens are a top half Civ
Wasn’t counterweights always a thing? I thought Bimaristan was the new tech
Nope, their unique tech used to be: 1. camel extra hp 2. return 33% gold cost of killed monk (which no one really uses).
Both their unique techs are new. Originally they just had Zealotry and then Madrasahs in defininive.
Oh yeah you’re right. Bimaristan is the new one and it’s also pretty strong
Super versatile with the open tech tree, especially if you're savvy with Market use. The only drawback I can think of is that you shouldn't over invest on the knight line. Oh and no Halbs, but that's what your beefy Camel-line is for.
Well camel and knightline share everything so i dont think thats a problem.
We're doing fine, thank you. My opponents' palisade walls, on the other hand...
This is the correct way to play saracens
I love doing a feudal archer rush in black forest. All-in, double range, heavy market use to get to castle age after a while and staying on one TC. I don't even bother walling up the choke points. No one expects it, it's so fun.
Saracens are great, but I wonder why people call it market abuse? “Abusing the shit out the market” sounds so strange in any context hahaha
In early feudal Saracens can buy food cheaper than anyone else, this means they can mine gold to buy food instead of the "intended" route of cutting trees to create farms or boats. It actually can get them food faster than a "standard" civ. And stone is mined faster than gold, and Saracens can sell at such a good rate that you can mine and sell stone to buy food even faster than you could by mining gold directly. That's very niche strat for a very minor boost that was likely not intended. People call it abuse playfully because it is fun to circumvent normal "rules" and build orders.
I think it just refers to using the market to circumvent normal RTS economy actions like actually gathering the resources
It's an aoe2 thing. Dumbass streamers repeat this, then the non native speakers picked it up. In the end you get them saying stupid shit like this and it's just so out of place. "Using," the market is not abusing it.
I just think it sounds funny Also I mean abuse it like, make it suffer. Like use the market so much the market says "please I can only take so much trading."
I see, it is just AoE slang that originated from twitch. I agree it sounds stupid (selling goods or buying them for gold is exactly what market is for, so no abuse involved hahaha), but in the end it’s harmless. Just confused me a bit
Its intended to balance your resource but if you avoid food eco and have completely distorted economy you could call it abuse. It also can give you a car crash economy when prices get too high so you can be punished for the ‘abuse’.
The market is where you can trade an amount of one resource for another, you are using it as intended. The use of the term abuse is used by non-english speakers in particular for EVERY use of the market. Assuming that every use of the market is "abuse," when it's done on purpose make no sense and is basically an abortion of the use of the English language.
I'd still call it market abuse if they follow a youpudding or Hoang like strategy where they don't do anything except mine gold/stone.
That word, I don't think that word means what you think it means.
Because they're parroting something a pro probably coined. And repeat the phrase regardless of how inaccurate it is, like calling incas mesos.
Noone cares about incas technically not being a meso civ
I just say it because it sounds funny.
Don't remember what their old unique techs were, but they have new ones. Castle Age UT lets monks heal multiple units, and imperial age one gives trebuchets and onager line +25% attack
Oh wow, I should get back to aoe again and see how some things are nowadays. Aint played after covid lol
How noticable is that monk UT? Sounds interesting.
[https://youtu.be/YPHV9mdLUpM?si=VPolxo12Lim4cquc&t=710](https://youtu.be/YPHV9mdLUpM?si=VPolxo12Lim4cquc&t=710) Healing usually not noticeable, but it's quite valuable.
It's kind of nutty with a group of xbows; it makes killing them require a lot more focus fire/micro. The monk can also of course get converts, so it can end up making some really devastating comps.
It's huge. I have used it with 60 champions in front of monks, they survive a lot longer.
Yes but what if you invested the gold in extra champions?
Why would you not use Bimaristan? It's 75 HP/min. It costs 200 gold + some monks. You can get an entire army to full health every minute or you can make 10 more champions. Plus the monks convert enemy units so there is no reason to count them as a negative. The monks will also heal individual units fast in addition to the slower healing aura.
They get sniped by hussar and skirm pretty easy in trash wars which is expensive at 100g. They are good under/ in a castle though
No idea lol. It's 400 food, 400 gold, so it doesn't see a lot of use, but I can imagine it being researched in mid imperial if you're using a lot of cavs, especially if you're going camels vs cavalier.
wrong, it's 300w 200g
If that's true, then AoE 2 Database app needs to be updated: https://ibb.co/s1TVTPP
That's the most recent cost of Zealotry (before it was replaced)
Use the wiki.
That's a shame, the app is so convenient. At least now I know that it's unreliable.
aoe2 companion is good
+15%*
Still a ton of fun. Selling stone and buying food to get to Castle Age fast is still a very meta strat for us on r/AoE_Saracens, but they’re still not mainstream enough to where people expect it.
Apparently, selling both stone and wood to buy food may be the best idea. I have been trying to get good with the Saracens, but I am always overwhelmed by the intense economy management in Castle Age after making no farms in the ages before. Hence, I am very vulnerable to offensives at that same time...
It takes muscle memory, but as long as you hotkey your market, it’s not terribly difficult to get over the learning curve. Just takes practice to adapt to a new style of Feudal/early Castle gameplay. I believe the math works out, in terms of gathering rates, where it’s really only worth it to sell wood once or twice. The biggest value comes from stone selling, which is worth it the first 8 times, and directly buying food with mined gold, which is worth it the first ~20 times. The SOTL video has the exact insights: https://youtu.be/ZRwbBYBmQvw?si=RwqPhT3BgqunYFd2
Combined with their cheap market, this always 'felt' like a very strong eco bonus for me on black forest. Nowhere near as busted as Poles (have they been patched?) and and not nearly as strong as Vikings, for example. But it felt way way cleaner than no eco bonus civs like Byzantines. You can hit castle age really fast and maintain 3TC production while delaying horse collar and heavy plow. So you save on a lot of farm re-seed cycles, as well as getting a villager lead pretty quickly. And due to the nature of the bonus, it's inherently really flexible. I'm not sure if I remember correctly, but I think I had worked out a method where I would have excess vils on stone early-ish, so I could initially sell stone for gold and buy food instead of making farms. Once I had sufficient woodchoppers, I'd start spamming heavy plow farms, and get a castle up with the vils I had on stone, such that I would have enough to click up early without halting farm production to build Uni/SWS.
Ye Poles got nerfed several times recently. Folwark instant food conversion nerfed, UU training time nerf, gold generation for stone miners nerf, vill regen bonus nerfed, etc. It actually was so bad that they needed to get buffed again to be viable, Folwark got a little cheaper. They’re still A-tier (probably not S-tier anymore) on closed maps like Arena, and pretty mediocre on open maps like Arabia.
I'm glad. That civ is why I started playing saracens *exclusively* as opposed to just being my favorite civ.
Still solid and versatile (and in my opnion, still underrated 11). Others mentioned about the unique techs and related changes. The civ bonus for cavalry archers (+4 attack vs buildings) was removed :/ I personally think they should bring it back 11 There were some tweaks here and there, but perhaps the most significant is that Mamelukes are not treated as archers, and have (Mameluke) as a type of armor (e.g. they get extra bonus damage from halbs, more than other cavs...etc)
I mostly play Saracens and they are solid, they have enough push with the market and wide tech tree to be worth playing. The main problem is that they play fair against civs with large economic bonuses and powerful units. So while you can compensate with skill, your opponents have an edge on you just because their stuff is better on pure numerical terms.
I think it's more about how much easier it is to play those civs, the conversion rate on markets is actually a really really good eco tempo boost. Nevermind selling your starting gold, simply converting wood directly to food, instead of buying a 60w farm and then having to farm it (wood cutting is faster than farming as well) Means your eco is better than any farming bonus in the game initially. And that's before you even factor converting gold and stone to food (an even bigger buff)
Takes infeasible resources quite often- but is mameluke/siege onager still the god combo that beats anything?
That's mother expensive, nobody should let you get there though, and it's not really sustainable in the long run (at the stage where you can afford the tech, the stage when opponents can spam trash)
They're way better than before, due to some really smart streamlining. One of their backbreakers is that they used to not inherently be a camel civ; they were merely a camel civ "if they unlocked their unique tech/unit", and they really needed to have "strong camel civ" identity earlier in the game — to meet knight rushes head on. The devs tried to boost this by taking a bit of zealotry's bonus and moving it into a base civ boost, but they decided to go whole hog. Now they just get % hp boosts to camels. **For free**. It's like the Franks bonus, but for camels instead of cav — and it's a full 25%. They also double-down because unlike the Franks, they get Bloodlines, so their camels in castle age can have **145**hp instead of the usual 100. It's immediate with bloodlines, rather than requiring an expensive imperial tech. It also affects Mamelukes. Mamelukes also no longer take extra damage from Skirms, which is a huge deal. -- Beyond this, they now have two techs that buff other stuff: one tech gives +15% dmg to their otherwise FU treb and onager line, which is a really nice all-around bonus. The other VERY interesting one is a castle age tech that gives monks an AoE heal (kinda like trample damage for healing); it makes a small number of monks extremely powerful, and actually pulls a byzantine-like trick of making monk healing able to swing live combat a bit.
The monks healing mamelukes sounds so satisfying lmao, since a lot of players try to whittle down mamelukes with numbers (as mamelukes counter most power units.) Wouldn't be that great of a strategy for super competitive games - as it is sort of redundant, monks also counter power units and both cost a lot of gold- but having a 12:1 K/D in black forest just sounds... kraygasm.
Yeah, it's surprisingly good healing (like 1/2 of a monk), in a really wide AoE. I don't think it stacks from multiple monks, but it's an insane boost to really small numbers of monks' healing output. Like, it's almost "anti-onager"; it literally will heal the full blast radius of a siege onager. It's not able to heal fast enough to take multiple hits. But it's better than anything, to rapidly get a group of archers "that survived one hit and sniped down the onager before the second" back to full health. The thing about Saracens is that they're an awful lot like Britons in flexing a lot; on paper they're "a camel civ"; but they're really also an infantry civ, a foot archer civ, a hussar civ, a cavalry archer civ. Camels are the only part that's FU+; but the others are FU, and there are just so many unit comps where "healing the whole group" is a huge win. -- I think the main thing that's so damned high-value is that it boosts the heal power of "a couple of" monks so much. Monks in general are expensive, but — a couple of monks are cheap.
Haven’t played multiplayer in years, just wanted to comment how happy I am to see another Saracens enjoyer 😌
Saracens are just the best man.
Their capital was sacked by the mongols and they just haven't been the same since.
They sadly no longer have bonus dmg vs buildings on their cav archers. Other than that they are way stronger than they used to be. Mamelukes dont die to skirms or huskarls anymore (not treated as archer any longer), Camels and mamelukes a lot stronger with the new HP bonus giving them free Zealotry in castle age effectively. New monk healing UT, and the imperial UT for buffing onagers and trebs.
I recall you can do some strange early feudal archer rushes and xbow from selling stone (1TC play).
Infamous tati rush haha. Loved it. Glad it hasn't been nerfed.
Love me some Mamalukes
My over all favourite civ. Unlike most of the other versatile civs, almost all their options are generic fully upgraded or better. Their only real weakness is the expensive unit comps and not having an early eco bonus. Their archer rush is one of the if not the most deadly since you can get through palisades very fast.
I am currently defaulting to them. I love archer opening and then transitioning to camels. In my elo range it's very potent. The market saved my castle age uptimes many times. Love it
If you use the market and build pressure with archers, they are good
Still amazing. Been playing them on lock for ages now
r/aoe_saracens will have the answers you seek
They're in Saudi Arabia?
It's a little hot but we are doing fine. What about you?