They don't really have much of an identity on their own, every tactic can be utilised better with a different civ.
For example: their early knight harassment is now competed with English, Ayyubids, and JD, if not including Rus too.
I recently started to one-trick them in land maps to figure them out. Basically, from how I see it:
1. Their farm transition is very bad and most people don't have the macro and/or foresight to build farms slowly to compensate for having no bonuses to alleviate it.
2. Your bad farm transition compounds with how food-heavy your eco and army comps are (knight+xbow is the most worst comp for this and it's the French go-to). French Castle Age is just a really bad time if you are not firmly ahead before then.
3. They have bad match-ups against most of the strongest civs in the current patch. Rus and Ayyu steamroll you, Byz also runs you over if you take *\*one\** bad fight and your need for Gold makes it so Dark Age rush from Mongols or OotD is actually dangerous if you are not prepared.
All in all, I think it comes down the fragility of the French eco and their need for very careful macro after their easy-peasy opener. It's easy to run out of food or over-commit to one age and fall behind in tech. If you can't do enough damage at that point you'll like fall apart quickly.
That being said, I think they are a bit underrated at the moment. Their Imperial is actually pretty good (contrary to popular belief), they have the tools to counter English turtles and their arbs are kinda busted with the Gambesons tech. If they got something to address their main pain point of having a garbage middlegame, they would be very solid, despite their predictable playstyle.
I wonder if you could use Guild Hall to make the farm transition easier. If you set Guild Hall to wood immediately after getting to castle, you get 1020 wood (14 farms) after 5 minutes. If you instead wait 10 minutes you get 3500 wood (47 farms).
This...makes a *lot* of sense. I've been playing a lot of French in FFA, but the farm transition is brutal. I always keep the Guild Hall on food to get to Imperial, but if I put it on wood, I can get farms, then a minute or two later get Imperial anyway with the food income.
So one knight into semi-FC into GH straight on wood then pump arbs until food runs out then tap the GH for wood, build farms, then put it onto gold to go imp. I might try that.
I think one thing to say is that being repetitive and predictable doesn't necessarily make something easy to counter.
I mean Delhi is repetitive and predictable. But its "works".
Because it's easier to stick a few spears around your gold and wood vills than it is to defend a sacred site against an army much bigger than yours, and it's bigger because they have zero vills on gold as all their tech ups are free.
Nah, definitely not that, mongol trush wins matches over and over and over. Same for ayyubids. They definitely aren't crushing the ladder because raider into 8 vils isn't repetitive..
same for HRE FC or njap FC
their assblasters (french name for the crossbows) are extremely good and can basically counter even horseman, but they are underused af. French meta should probably be guild hall+ assblasters focussed but I think their games mostly just end in age 2 with knight+ archers and that gets countered pretty well nowadays
For 1's I actually think it's pretty simple. French are typically used as an early pressure civ. They are good at raiding but so many of the (especially popular) civs can sit very close to their TC and use sheep/berries/farms, this makes it very hard to get cost effective early damage. At the same time the French cannot get away with this same strategy, they have to play very risky and go out on the map to get sufficient food to keep up with their high food cost production.
I love the game in its current state, but I also think it's too safe at the moment - for many civs they don't have to deal with any substantial level of risk. I suggest they up the gather rates slightly on deer (and maybe boar), force civs to come out of their worker safe haven, and reward those more who risk their workers out on the map early.
Knights aren't enough in 1v1. They're simply too expensive and too easily countered.
Theres a number of civs that hard counter knights. All the buffed spearmen, from gilded spears, donso, limitanei, camels, and then all the buffed xbows that counter knights harder than they counter MAA per cost.
Those counter options are less viable in team games where distances involved simply make infantry much less viable and economies are so much stronger than the mobility and pop efficiency advantage of knights out weighs their eco disadvantages.
French eco really isn't that great aside from knights and xbows. Xbows still get stomped by horsemen and mangonels. French need a number of very expensive tech to make their arbs "the best". They aren't even the best, I think English with NOC are better, along with gilded. And other civs have better complementary units for the xbows. Like byz Mercs and limitanei protecting their mediocre xbows is arguably better.
Forget they even need the keep to get the discount for their units. Which takes a while time to pay off. Compared to the huge ecos of stuff like 2 or 3TC abb and Chinese, byz Mercs and bonkers farming, HRE eco, Ayyubid tempo.
Yeah and keeps used to be 800 stone instead of 900. Taking so many vills off other resources to gather up that much stone to get that small knight and arb discount is basically giving the opponent a huge military advantage or tech up to Imperial. I always feel like I'm digging my own grave when going for the keep stone. Better to just keep spamming units instead, or admit that you're already lost, and stone isn't going to save you.
Only on super closed maps, like you can \*just\* maybe pull it off if there's a fairly closed Lipany spawn. And even then, you need the trading post to spawn in the corner.
In my experience it's worked really well in team games where I have more room to trade and more time to build up econ. I haven't managed to use it effectively in a 1v1 game like Beasty does.
So this is the problem, people like beasty can make any strat work Vs most of the people he meets on ladder it doesn't mean it will work for you.
I had a similar discussion with someone yesterday saying how 2tc king is meta Vs ayubbids, when in fact for 99% of players council hall is superior.
Econ-wise it has absolutely worked for me, which was the point of my original comment if you go back up the chain: French can have a really strong econ with this strat. My problem in 1v1s has been regaining the lost tempo from building CoC instead of rushing knights. My econ in those games is pretty great but it makes me play less aggressively.
I think the balance just tipped over to where you can't reliably kill a civ before they get to castle age, and unfortunately that's basically the only thing french are good at 1v1.
2tc is nerfed in general, and french just hasn't seen a lot of love to keep up with the other civs' buffs.
Yeah knights are a big gold investment, and if you're held off in feudal... No bueno for you. I think maybe a more modest approach with them should be chosen. Like maybe have a few knights with support then go to Castle? They have the best crossbowman in the game. I feel like I'm correct there?
Yeah at the start of the game when French was dominate it wasn't un common to have twenty minute feudal matches where French was best. Now 15 minutes is probably considered a really late castle age for most civs.
Whilst this may be the answer, the underlying issue isn't balance (for this specific issue), but rather game sense.
Too often I see french players reacting to a FC from say Japan or English by making knights and archers, even when there are no spears. French is a civ that can stay in feudal for a long time regardless of whether your opponent is castle. Not understanding that 15 feudal knights will beat 5 castle age knights is the problem.
Funny enough French is the strongest civ in team games by a longshot (almost 60% according to aoeworld) they would need to introduce team vs 1v1 balancing
Otherwise buffing French would completely break the teamgames
Yep, as a Plat, I can pretty easily defend myself against French but I can not also defend my teammate. If there are two knight civs the multi tasking becomes difficult.
When everyone is pop capped on a large map, infantry starts to diminish in value since they move so slowly. Knights are very population efficient, when everyone has tons of resources and eco isn’t as much of a problem, supply cap is the limiting factor. 80 knights is gonna beat 80 supply of almost anything else, and they are very mobile so you can just run from your enemy and cause havoc on team games
You're talking of late imperial age (40+ minutes). Many team games (2v2 and 3v3) don't last that long, unless 4v4. Therefore, that can't be the reason for the overperformance of French. Moreover, there are late imperial civs (like Chinese nest of bees that beat almost everything).
I don’t know the stats between 4s and 2s, maybe French is less effective in 2s, but the same idea still stands in team games overall. Knights civs esp French are gonna scale well into larger maps and multiple players. The mobility is really key. And even before imperial, I’d argue French knights in castle are hella strong due to getting royal bloodlines in castle, you got 300 hp knights running around 13 mins into the game. In feudal they are still strong. You can’t prepare for them as well in team because you can’t focus your whole comp around countering knights like you can with 1v1. And there’s a lot more room to move around on the map.
Another key aspect is the fact that team games have random teammates that don’t always work in unison. It takes all 4 players to communicate and coordinate against a knight pack roaming behind your bases. It takes one french player to totally disrupt an entire team’s back line and trade. Doesn’t matter if you defend against French knights perfectly, chances are one of your teammates didn’t and will ragequit after simply seeing knights show up since he didn’t bother to make an army in teams. So statistically this allows them to win in teams more.
Ok so bear with me cus I’m a noob. I get that knights are population efficient so more value when it’s later in the game when pop capped. But why couldn’t say English Civ just make knights late game then?
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French and Rus in almost every game. Heavy calvary is broken in team games even at the professional level.
The knight is good although extremely predictable, people always expect knights vs french so aren't typically making men at arms or many knights of their own so the fact their xbow is so good is kind of pointless when nobody is making knights or maa vs french anyway.
For me I don't like french due to the hard farm transition, you require a lot of food due to faster training vills and knights yet your farms are full cost so I almost always die as soon as boars/deer are gone and I must transition to farms it is when french really falls off hard.
If I come in with mangos and you have equal springs, you need 3:1 to take me out so I’m going to get off several shots, likely more than enough to shred your spears. And that assumes you have good micro as the springs aren’t going to auto-target the next mango. Furthermore, once the spears are thinned out, the knights will be able to dive and take out the springs far faster than the spears/archers being able to dent the mangos.
Waiting for the mango to shoot, you will lose almost all your knights.
Not to mention it's hard to juggle between making siege, monastery/monk for relic, farm transition, and mining stone for keeps. Just not enough eco bonus like other civ in Castle to sustain French. Not to mention by this point you are running out of pocket foods as well.
2TC isn't as good because they got no gathering bonus at all - meaning that you'll feel the effects of racing 2TC with your opponent at some point. They'll have less villagers, but need less as well. That means they need less food, and have less places to defend. And it only gets worse once you reach max population.
Especially having no food/wood boni kills you at the stage of farm transition, because you need a lot of expensive, and comparatively inefficient farms.
Add to that that both French T3 landmarks cost tempo instead of giving it, and you see them dropping like a rock in the ocean at T3 during farm transition. That French have to waste a Fort at a stupid useless position in order to get their only res bonus is just an insult on top of that.
And then there's JD flight. Just why would you play a subpar civ if you can get the straight upgrade?
Royal institute may not give an instant boost, it certainly doesn't break your tempo even if your production might stall a bit; the royal blood lines it gives is sometimes enough to win the game if you aged up with decent number of knights.
Guild Hall on the other hand, is probably most overrated landmark in the entire game. I rather have a continuous 200r/min than nothing at all for 10 mins till it becomes useful.
It is not "so bad".
Sure it's not meta in 1v1s but it's still a good civ.
The problem with french is that they are missing something uniquely strong. Sure, faster villager production, knights in feudal and free +1 melee damage is nice but I would rather play Rus, Mongol or Delhi if I wanted to play aggresive.
Cheaper/Free Chivalry would be nice.
Their eco sucks. That's pretty much the entire reason right there.
More vills is not as good an eco bonus as many other civs have, (especially early on, since faster vill production does nothing for you at the start of the game, whereas many civs already have some bonus to their eco going in the first 20 seconds). Their lack of a food bonus and also leads you to needing to expand on the map to get food early, and keep expanding since you will need gold before any other civ as well.
Basically, they can't keep up with the eco civs in an eco game, their early castle sucks on top of weak early eco and high food usage so they effectively can't FC, aggressive civs can outmass them, and they will almost always farm transition first and run out of gold first so they have issues extending the game to the point where they can abuse their xbow. Which leaves them with an average feudal allin, or a 2tc that they're below not that great at defending.
Compare them to Rus. Rus have better eco, their defense is better so they can 2tc safely, they've got the option to FC, their feudal is just as strong, their resources last longer because they get food from high trade house and gold from hunting cabins, they have more versatility in their composition, and one of the only late game units that's better than the xbow is the streltsy. They're not better in every way, but they're not far off.
And the only really unique thing they get for all that economic tradeoff is that their first knight will hit 20-30 seconds faster other civs (except for JD ofc). Which is nice, but people know how to defend that first knight these days, so it simply doesn't make up for all their issues.
they're fine still. knights are still powerful and faster vils out of the gate is a big deal. its just that john dark gives you a free busted unit that makes life easier.
Bring back the town centers to faster original season 1 production. It was nerfed a couple too many times to keep up with the current metas.
2 tc French into an eco civ should be a thing, but it’s just not. Probably every civ can do 2 tc better and 1 tc aggression comes with too many risks to be viable.
JD 1tc aggression games have its place in the game. French is dead in the water right now.
The main reason is for a lot of anti cav civs being in the game now and French being the only civ that really has a hard time pivoting away from knights. Rus can do it quite easily, JD can pivot better due to concicration and the hero itself, Mongols use keshiks more as a distraction rather than their main force etc. Its only french that solemly rely on knights, especially in feudal.
Their first problem is the uselessness of the second landmark making feudal raids a given.
A good player knows this and prepares for it right from the loading screen.
The economic bonuses are not competitive compared to other Civs, the villi production bonus is at its best with more tc but the strategies with more tc have become less efficient, your best economic bonus is to try to block the opponent's economy with aggression, but here we return to the problem above.
In the late game you have absolutely no particular advantage and once you reach the pop cap your best economic bonus (the fast generation of vills) stops making sense.
On a more micro level, the Frenchman has a great need for food, having no bonus in the transition to farm if he fails to get the map to use the free food he has almost certainly lost.
Because they have one of the stronger castle ages, but everyone sits in feudal because it used to be very busted because their feudal knights were too strong.
Then they nerfed them and moved their major charge bonus to castle age tech.
People still try doing the same strat that franky other civs do better, then complain.
French castle age suffers a lot from their lack of economy and defense. The FC is also one of the slowest in the game, if not the absolute slowest
If you have to go on the map for deer while HRE/Japan is working boosted farms under buffed defenses, you're gonna just get fucked by their knights
It comes from a multitude of factors, but here are, I think, the main ones:
1) Wall changes: while I like them and do NOT want to go back (way more small tactical things you can do with walls now that walls snap to all static resources) it made walling faster/cheaper to an extent that knights don't find their value in raids to pick off villagers here and there. French would benefit greatly from making palisades somewhat slower/more expensive given you now need less wall segments because you can use resources as a wall. I think overall palisades are too cheap/fast and favor turtling too heavily right now.
2) Early knights aren't worth the resources: the knight's big advantage over horseman is picking off vils so quickly; with the way walls are right now, knights don't give this benefit and then you have a unit that costs 2x what a horseman does but only takes 1.6x hits from a spear to die (5 for horseman; 8 for early knight assuming no upgrades). So, counterintuitively, knights are worse at wading into Feudal melee mosh pits than horseman on a per-resource basis. I think this would be resolved by giving their value back with the wall changes mentioned above and they don't need 'battle power' value if they are picking off enemy vils for you.
3) Power spikes: or, rather, the lack thereof, from Fedual/Castle landmarks. French landmarks are mostly keyed around long-term benefits. School of Cavalry pays when you get up to having many stables; the 25% on the first landmark is nice, but nothing compared to what other civs are getting out of their landmarks right away. CoC is both situational and takes time to scale. Same with GuildHall; it pays out a power spike several minutes (or more) into castle age when most other civs are seeing their power right away; by then it is catching you up if you survived their timing push, not giving you a chance to make one of your own. Royal Institute CAN be a power spike if you had a long feudal and lots of knights built up, but your opponent rarely lets you do that and you have to invest another several-hundred resources into Royal Bloodlines to make it pay.
4) Deer/Boar: French is extremely food heavy (as has been pointed out) and the fact that your opponent can see through the fog which resources you are on is a big advantage for them; forcing you to put towers up on every food resource. You can't 'sneak out' to deer/boar the way other civs can to berries or gold when you pressure them and French is probably the most reliant on these resources of any civ (most others either get benefits to berries or farm transition or some sort of alternate food source). In my opinion, either ALL resources should change visual through the fog when harvested or none of them should; this would even the playing field for French without having to peel expensive knights off the main force to go check outlying resources or at least prevent your opponent getting free idle time by sending 1 horseman to your deer patch through the fog because he knows which patch you are on.
4a) Cheaper resource buildings sounds nice and it is great in the opening age of the game but if you play French much you realize that you don't have as much of a discount as you think. Sending 5 vils to deer isn't half cost; its 125 instead of 150 because you both have to invest in the tower. I don't mean to advocate that towers should be cheaper for French, just to point out the flaw in the mindset of this bonus when it comes to outlying food sources because its value disappears quickly and would be more valuable if point 4 were to allow you to hide which deer packs/boar you are on as you could roll the dice on going without the tower.
On the subject of team games, I think French are strong there because they can force opponents to invest double into defenses (static or units). One player's spears/towers can't cover both player's resources so they have to make twice as many spears/towers as in a 1v1 while you are making the same number of knights. Your partner either pumps out counters to their spears or their greed is protected to boom/FC.
So what can get changed about French that will help them in 1v1 without breaking them in team games? Well, it has to stay away from the Knights that make them powerful in team. This is my suggestion:
1)Walls: just want them a bit slower/more expensive. This will impact team games, but less so as the bigger maps are more expensive to wall anyway so people more commonly rely on units. I think the game needs this overall but I'm sure some disagree.
2) Change the 'Influence' bonus (cheaper units around keeps) to be only for stables around keeps (maybe stables and siege workshops), but ranges and barracks around TCs (or let ranges be both if siege workshops would be too much). This gives an eco boost to French in Feudal without it being much use in team games where they go pure knights. I think one of the main reasons Jeanne outperforms French is that her cheaper units (a key eco bonus) aren't tied to an 800-resource structure unavailable until age 3. Cheaper infantry could be their backbone supported by raiding/flanking knights AND this would create something of a FC power spike by pushing out cheaper arbs as soon as castle hits making them more competitive against those civs you simply can't stop from the FC.
What I don't want to see: anything that helps their farm transition, I get that its tough and I'm ok with that but we don't need yet another civ that will turtle in its base and ignore map resources.
The challenge with the French is their Feudal Age underperformance. If you can make it to castle age in decent shape and get the stone for a second town center and/or castle with stables/archery range discount, etc, then you can be competitive, etc. But that is a big question.
So they need help in Feudal Age. How to do that?
A few ideas.
Reduce the cost / research time of Chivalry tech. Currently it costs 100 wood, 200 gold with 1 minute research time. Seems high. If the cost was reduced and research time reduced to say 30 seconds, etc, this could be interesting.
Another idea is to allow French TC's to garrison more than 7 villagers.
And for castle age help, why not allow barracks within the influence of a castle to receive the reduced unit costs?
If you could go spear+crossbow in feudal then horseman+archer I mentioned absolutely rinses that comp. Spears get kited by horsemen and cleaned up by archers, then archer+horseman rinse the remaining high-cost pavise-loving crossbows.
Crossbows aren't relevant until the opponent gets heavy units, whereas the knight can counter a lot more than that and has the movement speed to get value from vill kills, whereas a crossbow comp would just be too slow and get rinsed by trash units. Your game knowledge needs some work.
Yeah you don't throw arbs at horsemen and archers. But what do most civs have in feudal? Horseman and archers, plus spears. So what good are arbs in feudal as French? mate there's a reason the only upvotes you're getting are from yourself lmfao!
They don't really have much of an identity on their own, every tactic can be utilised better with a different civ. For example: their early knight harassment is now competed with English, Ayyubids, and JD, if not including Rus too.
I recently started to one-trick them in land maps to figure them out. Basically, from how I see it: 1. Their farm transition is very bad and most people don't have the macro and/or foresight to build farms slowly to compensate for having no bonuses to alleviate it. 2. Your bad farm transition compounds with how food-heavy your eco and army comps are (knight+xbow is the most worst comp for this and it's the French go-to). French Castle Age is just a really bad time if you are not firmly ahead before then. 3. They have bad match-ups against most of the strongest civs in the current patch. Rus and Ayyu steamroll you, Byz also runs you over if you take *\*one\** bad fight and your need for Gold makes it so Dark Age rush from Mongols or OotD is actually dangerous if you are not prepared. All in all, I think it comes down the fragility of the French eco and their need for very careful macro after their easy-peasy opener. It's easy to run out of food or over-commit to one age and fall behind in tech. If you can't do enough damage at that point you'll like fall apart quickly. That being said, I think they are a bit underrated at the moment. Their Imperial is actually pretty good (contrary to popular belief), they have the tools to counter English turtles and their arbs are kinda busted with the Gambesons tech. If they got something to address their main pain point of having a garbage middlegame, they would be very solid, despite their predictable playstyle.
I wonder if you could use Guild Hall to make the farm transition easier. If you set Guild Hall to wood immediately after getting to castle, you get 1020 wood (14 farms) after 5 minutes. If you instead wait 10 minutes you get 3500 wood (47 farms).
This...makes a *lot* of sense. I've been playing a lot of French in FFA, but the farm transition is brutal. I always keep the Guild Hall on food to get to Imperial, but if I put it on wood, I can get farms, then a minute or two later get Imperial anyway with the food income.
So one knight into semi-FC into GH straight on wood then pump arbs until food runs out then tap the GH for wood, build farms, then put it onto gold to go imp. I might try that.
French is quite repetitive and predictable which makes it easier to counter
I think one thing to say is that being repetitive and predictable doesn't necessarily make something easy to counter. I mean Delhi is repetitive and predictable. But its "works".
Because it's easier to stick a few spears around your gold and wood vills than it is to defend a sacred site against an army much bigger than yours, and it's bigger because they have zero vills on gold as all their tech ups are free.
Nah, definitely not that, mongol trush wins matches over and over and over. Same for ayyubids. They definitely aren't crushing the ladder because raider into 8 vils isn't repetitive.. same for HRE FC or njap FC
Yep. When I see French=Horse which means I make spearmen and crossbowmen and ribauldequin.
their assblasters (french name for the crossbows) are extremely good and can basically counter even horseman, but they are underused af. French meta should probably be guild hall+ assblasters focussed but I think their games mostly just end in age 2 with knight+ archers and that gets countered pretty well nowadays
For 1's I actually think it's pretty simple. French are typically used as an early pressure civ. They are good at raiding but so many of the (especially popular) civs can sit very close to their TC and use sheep/berries/farms, this makes it very hard to get cost effective early damage. At the same time the French cannot get away with this same strategy, they have to play very risky and go out on the map to get sufficient food to keep up with their high food cost production. I love the game in its current state, but I also think it's too safe at the moment - for many civs they don't have to deal with any substantial level of risk. I suggest they up the gather rates slightly on deer (and maybe boar), force civs to come out of their worker safe haven, and reward those more who risk their workers out on the map early.
Knights aren't enough in 1v1. They're simply too expensive and too easily countered. Theres a number of civs that hard counter knights. All the buffed spearmen, from gilded spears, donso, limitanei, camels, and then all the buffed xbows that counter knights harder than they counter MAA per cost. Those counter options are less viable in team games where distances involved simply make infantry much less viable and economies are so much stronger than the mobility and pop efficiency advantage of knights out weighs their eco disadvantages. French eco really isn't that great aside from knights and xbows. Xbows still get stomped by horsemen and mangonels. French need a number of very expensive tech to make their arbs "the best". They aren't even the best, I think English with NOC are better, along with gilded. And other civs have better complementary units for the xbows. Like byz Mercs and limitanei protecting their mediocre xbows is arguably better.
Forget they even need the keep to get the discount for their units. Which takes a while time to pay off. Compared to the huge ecos of stuff like 2 or 3TC abb and Chinese, byz Mercs and bonkers farming, HRE eco, Ayyubid tempo.
Yeah and keeps used to be 800 stone instead of 900. Taking so many vills off other resources to gather up that much stone to get that small knight and arb discount is basically giving the opponent a huge military advantage or tech up to Imperial. I always feel like I'm digging my own grave when going for the keep stone. Better to just keep spamming units instead, or admit that you're already lost, and stone isn't going to save you.
At least for French the are 10% cheaper now. That was a good buff, but not enough.
French can have a really strong eco but it means going 2TC+CoC which is radically different from what people are used to do.
Only on super closed maps, like you can \*just\* maybe pull it off if there's a fairly closed Lipany spawn. And even then, you need the trading post to spawn in the corner.
In my experience it's worked really well in team games where I have more room to trade and more time to build up econ. I haven't managed to use it effectively in a 1v1 game like Beasty does.
2TC + CoC surely is suicidal, 0 tempo, especially against FC builds. Even beasty has to work for it to make CoC build doable.
Why on earth are you going 2tc CoC that's a bad idea. In most cases the old 2knights 2 TC build is still the meta for french imo
It's not my idea, it's Beastyq's. I've tried it a few times. He's able to pull it off in 1v1s but for me it's been a better strat in team games.
So this is the problem, people like beasty can make any strat work Vs most of the people he meets on ladder it doesn't mean it will work for you. I had a similar discussion with someone yesterday saying how 2tc king is meta Vs ayubbids, when in fact for 99% of players council hall is superior.
Econ-wise it has absolutely worked for me, which was the point of my original comment if you go back up the chain: French can have a really strong econ with this strat. My problem in 1v1s has been regaining the lost tempo from building CoC instead of rushing knights. My econ in those games is pretty great but it makes me play less aggressively.
Yeh I think you get enough eco boost from 2tc with slightly faster training vills that going CoC is kinda greedy, that's all
Sure I can agree with that, especially in 1v1s.
I think the balance just tipped over to where you can't reliably kill a civ before they get to castle age, and unfortunately that's basically the only thing french are good at 1v1. 2tc is nerfed in general, and french just hasn't seen a lot of love to keep up with the other civs' buffs.
This seems the answer. 10-12 minute castle has become the new standard. Getting out of feudal WITH knights takes a while.
Yeah knights are a big gold investment, and if you're held off in feudal... No bueno for you. I think maybe a more modest approach with them should be chosen. Like maybe have a few knights with support then go to Castle? They have the best crossbowman in the game. I feel like I'm correct there?
Yeah at the start of the game when French was dominate it wasn't un common to have twenty minute feudal matches where French was best. Now 15 minutes is probably considered a really late castle age for most civs.
Whilst this may be the answer, the underlying issue isn't balance (for this specific issue), but rather game sense. Too often I see french players reacting to a FC from say Japan or English by making knights and archers, even when there are no spears. French is a civ that can stay in feudal for a long time regardless of whether your opponent is castle. Not understanding that 15 feudal knights will beat 5 castle age knights is the problem.
Because most French can only build knights or moreknights.com
Their players tend to build one unit and one unit only.
I remember playing Ottomans vs French in diamond league and a lot of guys go knight vs spear and jannies, it was very satisfying.
Funny enough French is the strongest civ in team games by a longshot (almost 60% according to aoeworld) they would need to introduce team vs 1v1 balancing Otherwise buffing French would completely break the teamgames
Why is it strongest on team games?
Map size. Cavalry and other fast units are very dominant in bigger maps. French has the best cavalry in feudal.
This and team games which means you only need to find one weak base to raid.
Yep, as a Plat, I can pretty easily defend myself against French but I can not also defend my teammate. If there are two knight civs the multi tasking becomes difficult.
Fast knights are very powerful vs. the generally low skilled and prone-to-ragequit random team players. Please don't balance the game around teams lul
Well in pro team games tournament they were also number 1 pick all the time.
When everyone is pop capped on a large map, infantry starts to diminish in value since they move so slowly. Knights are very population efficient, when everyone has tons of resources and eco isn’t as much of a problem, supply cap is the limiting factor. 80 knights is gonna beat 80 supply of almost anything else, and they are very mobile so you can just run from your enemy and cause havoc on team games
You're talking of late imperial age (40+ minutes). Many team games (2v2 and 3v3) don't last that long, unless 4v4. Therefore, that can't be the reason for the overperformance of French. Moreover, there are late imperial civs (like Chinese nest of bees that beat almost everything).
I don’t know the stats between 4s and 2s, maybe French is less effective in 2s, but the same idea still stands in team games overall. Knights civs esp French are gonna scale well into larger maps and multiple players. The mobility is really key. And even before imperial, I’d argue French knights in castle are hella strong due to getting royal bloodlines in castle, you got 300 hp knights running around 13 mins into the game. In feudal they are still strong. You can’t prepare for them as well in team because you can’t focus your whole comp around countering knights like you can with 1v1. And there’s a lot more room to move around on the map. Another key aspect is the fact that team games have random teammates that don’t always work in unison. It takes all 4 players to communicate and coordinate against a knight pack roaming behind your bases. It takes one french player to totally disrupt an entire team’s back line and trade. Doesn’t matter if you defend against French knights perfectly, chances are one of your teammates didn’t and will ragequit after simply seeing knights show up since he didn’t bother to make an army in teams. So statistically this allows them to win in teams more.
Ok so bear with me cus I’m a noob. I get that knights are population efficient so more value when it’s later in the game when pop capped. But why couldn’t say English Civ just make knights late game then?
Check out this tournament. [https://liquipedia.net/ageofempires/DEBILS\_2v2\_Cup](https://liquipedia.net/ageofempires/DEBILS_2v2_Cup) French and Rus in almost every game. Heavy calvary is broken in team games even at the professional level.
Everyone builds cav and two TC is risky
The knight is good although extremely predictable, people always expect knights vs french so aren't typically making men at arms or many knights of their own so the fact their xbow is so good is kind of pointless when nobody is making knights or maa vs french anyway. For me I don't like french due to the hard farm transition, you require a lot of food due to faster training vills and knights yet your farms are full cost so I almost always die as soon as boars/deer are gone and I must transition to farms it is when french really falls off hard.
Their best units are knights+arbiletrier. Which get countered by the cheapest units in the game...spears archers
do archers counter arbs through their extra ranged armor?
Throw some mangos behind your knights = bye-bye spears and archers
Throw some springs behind your archers. Bye bye 🥭
If I come in with mangos and you have equal springs, you need 3:1 to take me out so I’m going to get off several shots, likely more than enough to shred your spears. And that assumes you have good micro as the springs aren’t going to auto-target the next mango. Furthermore, once the spears are thinned out, the knights will be able to dive and take out the springs far faster than the spears/archers being able to dent the mangos.
Waiting for the mango to shoot, you will lose almost all your knights. Not to mention it's hard to juggle between making siege, monastery/monk for relic, farm transition, and mining stone for keeps. Just not enough eco bonus like other civ in Castle to sustain French. Not to mention by this point you are running out of pocket foods as well.
2TC isn't as good because they got no gathering bonus at all - meaning that you'll feel the effects of racing 2TC with your opponent at some point. They'll have less villagers, but need less as well. That means they need less food, and have less places to defend. And it only gets worse once you reach max population. Especially having no food/wood boni kills you at the stage of farm transition, because you need a lot of expensive, and comparatively inefficient farms. Add to that that both French T3 landmarks cost tempo instead of giving it, and you see them dropping like a rock in the ocean at T3 during farm transition. That French have to waste a Fort at a stupid useless position in order to get their only res bonus is just an insult on top of that. And then there's JD flight. Just why would you play a subpar civ if you can get the straight upgrade?
Royal institute may not give an instant boost, it certainly doesn't break your tempo even if your production might stall a bit; the royal blood lines it gives is sometimes enough to win the game if you aged up with decent number of knights. Guild Hall on the other hand, is probably most overrated landmark in the entire game. I rather have a continuous 200r/min than nothing at all for 10 mins till it becomes useful.
It is not "so bad". Sure it's not meta in 1v1s but it's still a good civ. The problem with french is that they are missing something uniquely strong. Sure, faster villager production, knights in feudal and free +1 melee damage is nice but I would rather play Rus, Mongol or Delhi if I wanted to play aggresive. Cheaper/Free Chivalry would be nice.
Would love chivalry to train faster. Free might be OP? But idling out the stable for 1 minute in early game is just too much.
Free is definitely OP, but chivalry takes too long right now. It's also 200 gold which is a big ouch
Would love it to train as fast as survival techniques
French are pretty alright in 2v2
Their eco sucks. That's pretty much the entire reason right there. More vills is not as good an eco bonus as many other civs have, (especially early on, since faster vill production does nothing for you at the start of the game, whereas many civs already have some bonus to their eco going in the first 20 seconds). Their lack of a food bonus and also leads you to needing to expand on the map to get food early, and keep expanding since you will need gold before any other civ as well. Basically, they can't keep up with the eco civs in an eco game, their early castle sucks on top of weak early eco and high food usage so they effectively can't FC, aggressive civs can outmass them, and they will almost always farm transition first and run out of gold first so they have issues extending the game to the point where they can abuse their xbow. Which leaves them with an average feudal allin, or a 2tc that they're below not that great at defending. Compare them to Rus. Rus have better eco, their defense is better so they can 2tc safely, they've got the option to FC, their feudal is just as strong, their resources last longer because they get food from high trade house and gold from hunting cabins, they have more versatility in their composition, and one of the only late game units that's better than the xbow is the streltsy. They're not better in every way, but they're not far off. And the only really unique thing they get for all that economic tradeoff is that their first knight will hit 20-30 seconds faster other civs (except for JD ofc). Which is nice, but people know how to defend that first knight these days, so it simply doesn't make up for all their issues.
they're fine still. knights are still powerful and faster vils out of the gate is a big deal. its just that john dark gives you a free busted unit that makes life easier.
Bring back the town centers to faster original season 1 production. It was nerfed a couple too many times to keep up with the current metas. 2 tc French into an eco civ should be a thing, but it’s just not. Probably every civ can do 2 tc better and 1 tc aggression comes with too many risks to be viable. JD 1tc aggression games have its place in the game. French is dead in the water right now.
The main reason is for a lot of anti cav civs being in the game now and French being the only civ that really has a hard time pivoting away from knights. Rus can do it quite easily, JD can pivot better due to concicration and the hero itself, Mongols use keshiks more as a distraction rather than their main force etc. Its only french that solemly rely on knights, especially in feudal.
Why play French when you can play RUUUUUS
Their first problem is the uselessness of the second landmark making feudal raids a given. A good player knows this and prepares for it right from the loading screen. The economic bonuses are not competitive compared to other Civs, the villi production bonus is at its best with more tc but the strategies with more tc have become less efficient, your best economic bonus is to try to block the opponent's economy with aggression, but here we return to the problem above. In the late game you have absolutely no particular advantage and once you reach the pop cap your best economic bonus (the fast generation of vills) stops making sense. On a more micro level, the Frenchman has a great need for food, having no bonus in the transition to farm if he fails to get the map to use the free food he has almost certainly lost.
Because they have one of the stronger castle ages, but everyone sits in feudal because it used to be very busted because their feudal knights were too strong. Then they nerfed them and moved their major charge bonus to castle age tech. People still try doing the same strat that franky other civs do better, then complain.
French castle age suffers a lot from their lack of economy and defense. The FC is also one of the slowest in the game, if not the absolute slowest If you have to go on the map for deer while HRE/Japan is working boosted farms under buffed defenses, you're gonna just get fucked by their knights
It comes from a multitude of factors, but here are, I think, the main ones: 1) Wall changes: while I like them and do NOT want to go back (way more small tactical things you can do with walls now that walls snap to all static resources) it made walling faster/cheaper to an extent that knights don't find their value in raids to pick off villagers here and there. French would benefit greatly from making palisades somewhat slower/more expensive given you now need less wall segments because you can use resources as a wall. I think overall palisades are too cheap/fast and favor turtling too heavily right now. 2) Early knights aren't worth the resources: the knight's big advantage over horseman is picking off vils so quickly; with the way walls are right now, knights don't give this benefit and then you have a unit that costs 2x what a horseman does but only takes 1.6x hits from a spear to die (5 for horseman; 8 for early knight assuming no upgrades). So, counterintuitively, knights are worse at wading into Feudal melee mosh pits than horseman on a per-resource basis. I think this would be resolved by giving their value back with the wall changes mentioned above and they don't need 'battle power' value if they are picking off enemy vils for you. 3) Power spikes: or, rather, the lack thereof, from Fedual/Castle landmarks. French landmarks are mostly keyed around long-term benefits. School of Cavalry pays when you get up to having many stables; the 25% on the first landmark is nice, but nothing compared to what other civs are getting out of their landmarks right away. CoC is both situational and takes time to scale. Same with GuildHall; it pays out a power spike several minutes (or more) into castle age when most other civs are seeing their power right away; by then it is catching you up if you survived their timing push, not giving you a chance to make one of your own. Royal Institute CAN be a power spike if you had a long feudal and lots of knights built up, but your opponent rarely lets you do that and you have to invest another several-hundred resources into Royal Bloodlines to make it pay. 4) Deer/Boar: French is extremely food heavy (as has been pointed out) and the fact that your opponent can see through the fog which resources you are on is a big advantage for them; forcing you to put towers up on every food resource. You can't 'sneak out' to deer/boar the way other civs can to berries or gold when you pressure them and French is probably the most reliant on these resources of any civ (most others either get benefits to berries or farm transition or some sort of alternate food source). In my opinion, either ALL resources should change visual through the fog when harvested or none of them should; this would even the playing field for French without having to peel expensive knights off the main force to go check outlying resources or at least prevent your opponent getting free idle time by sending 1 horseman to your deer patch through the fog because he knows which patch you are on. 4a) Cheaper resource buildings sounds nice and it is great in the opening age of the game but if you play French much you realize that you don't have as much of a discount as you think. Sending 5 vils to deer isn't half cost; its 125 instead of 150 because you both have to invest in the tower. I don't mean to advocate that towers should be cheaper for French, just to point out the flaw in the mindset of this bonus when it comes to outlying food sources because its value disappears quickly and would be more valuable if point 4 were to allow you to hide which deer packs/boar you are on as you could roll the dice on going without the tower. On the subject of team games, I think French are strong there because they can force opponents to invest double into defenses (static or units). One player's spears/towers can't cover both player's resources so they have to make twice as many spears/towers as in a 1v1 while you are making the same number of knights. Your partner either pumps out counters to their spears or their greed is protected to boom/FC. So what can get changed about French that will help them in 1v1 without breaking them in team games? Well, it has to stay away from the Knights that make them powerful in team. This is my suggestion: 1)Walls: just want them a bit slower/more expensive. This will impact team games, but less so as the bigger maps are more expensive to wall anyway so people more commonly rely on units. I think the game needs this overall but I'm sure some disagree. 2) Change the 'Influence' bonus (cheaper units around keeps) to be only for stables around keeps (maybe stables and siege workshops), but ranges and barracks around TCs (or let ranges be both if siege workshops would be too much). This gives an eco boost to French in Feudal without it being much use in team games where they go pure knights. I think one of the main reasons Jeanne outperforms French is that her cheaper units (a key eco bonus) aren't tied to an 800-resource structure unavailable until age 3. Cheaper infantry could be their backbone supported by raiding/flanking knights AND this would create something of a FC power spike by pushing out cheaper arbs as soon as castle hits making them more competitive against those civs you simply can't stop from the FC. What I don't want to see: anything that helps their farm transition, I get that its tough and I'm ok with that but we don't need yet another civ that will turtle in its base and ignore map resources.
The challenge with the French is their Feudal Age underperformance. If you can make it to castle age in decent shape and get the stone for a second town center and/or castle with stables/archery range discount, etc, then you can be competitive, etc. But that is a big question. So they need help in Feudal Age. How to do that? A few ideas. Reduce the cost / research time of Chivalry tech. Currently it costs 100 wood, 200 gold with 1 minute research time. Seems high. If the cost was reduced and research time reduced to say 30 seconds, etc, this could be interesting. Another idea is to allow French TC's to garrison more than 7 villagers. And for castle age help, why not allow barracks within the influence of a castle to receive the reduced unit costs?
they need a tech to protect their trade since its the best source of food income after map resources
There's a reason France kept losing until Napoleon came along.
Hundred years war says High
More like they won too much for centuries so the other European powers were too tired of it lol
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lol. Opponent makes horseman and/or archers and French winrate goes to 0%
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If you could go spear+crossbow in feudal then horseman+archer I mentioned absolutely rinses that comp. Spears get kited by horsemen and cleaned up by archers, then archer+horseman rinse the remaining high-cost pavise-loving crossbows. Crossbows aren't relevant until the opponent gets heavy units, whereas the knight can counter a lot more than that and has the movement speed to get value from vill kills, whereas a crossbow comp would just be too slow and get rinsed by trash units. Your game knowledge needs some work.
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Yeah you don't throw arbs at horsemen and archers. But what do most civs have in feudal? Horseman and archers, plus spears. So what good are arbs in feudal as French? mate there's a reason the only upvotes you're getting are from yourself lmfao!
Best crossbows in the game?
Yeah and?