Talk:Throwing Axeman (Age of Empires II)/@comment-157.49.26.122-20180427042259/@comment-27202541-20180430001629

>Though I agree that ETXs are powerless in enemy territories facing powerful units like the TKnights. But then, being a defensive unit why would anyone use the ETX for offense ? Franks have Chivalry so their go-to offensive would contain mainly their heavy Paladins

That's not how this game works. In competitive play no one ever simply keeps a bunch of units back at home near their Castle(s) for defense, they'll attack with basically everything they have. Players might often keep a couple of units back at some points to defend from raids (like if you're expecting your opponent to keep sending in Hussars to your economy, keep a few Halberdiers behind to deter/kill the Hussars), but never entire armies. You always want to push and kill your opponent with your force.

You can't just send Paladins forward for offense anyway, because they'll be vulnerable to counters like Halberdiers, Heavy Camels, Monks etc; you need to have the Elite Throwing Axemen forward to kill those counter units.

An expensive balanced army composition for an attack for the Franks would be something like Paladin + Elite Throwing Axeman + Bombard Cannon; the Paladins are the main force (counters most units), the ETX are the support unit (kills the counters to the palas, mainly halbs), and the BBCs are siege units to kill buildings.

Usually you don't see combinations like this though, because in a 1v1 you usually don't have enough gold to keep spamming the knight-line (it costs 75 gold) and won't have enough resources at most points to invest 1300 food and 750 gold into the Paladin upgrade, and if you were investing gold into Paladins you wouldn't want to invest even more gold into ETX and would rather make a trash unit like Elite Skirmishers instead, which are a cheap unit to contrast the high cost of palas. However, the Franks do not have good elite skirms, so instead you will probably see the gold invested the other way around; Elite Throwing Axemen as the gold-intensive unit, and Halberdiers as the trash support unit. That's what we usually see in 1 vs 1 games; often it is Hand Cannoneers rather than ETX, but in the expansions where ETX are buffed a lot, it's probably better in most situations to use those instead of hand cannons.

In a team game, you usually don't see Paladin + ETX, why? Because usually a Franks player will just go 100% Paladins, and the teammates will be the ones to make support units. If you were to have two Franks players on a team, you might see one of them go full pala and the other go full ETX, so then you'd have a balanced army composition with each player only having to invest into one type of unit each. If you have Franks + Ethiopians you might have Paladin + Arbalest, if you have Franks + Saracens you might have Elite Throwing Axeman + Elite Mameluke (and the Saracens player might add some Siege Onagers to deal with opposing siege and archers).

When you say you're an "above noob player," what do you mean? Can you beat a Hardest AI? If you can then you're not an ultra noob, but if you don't play this game on multiplayer at a level above 1600 ELO then I hate to break it to you but you are probably a noob.