Talk:Janissary (Age of Empires II)/@comment-31246346-20170208124409/@comment-4937115-20170601171752

It depends on if your opponent has good unit control or not, your and his gold situation, your available units and strengths, and the map style.

If your opponent does not control his units well, you can use onagers to kill the janissaries. If he is a good player though, he kills the onagers with both the cavalry and the bombard cannons. Still, a lucky shot from just 1 onager can wipe out his janissaries and turn the whole battle around.

Turks will use bombard cannons instead of onager (no onager upgrade, better cannons). One disadvantage of the bombard cannon compared to the onager is that it does worse against trash, leaving the turk vulnerable to your trash: halbs versus his hussars, skirms versus his janissaries, your own hussars vs his bombard cannons. Keep throwing trash at him (while controlling it well to ensure favourable engagements) until he runs out of gold. The best way to do this is to throw your hussars out first against his cannons. He will either lose his cannons, or pull his other units back to defend. While he pulls his units back, you can get your elite skirms and halbs closer. Make sure to keep your skirms and halbs lose together, that way the halbs can kill the hussar before the skirms die, and the skimrs punish the janissaryes for attacking your halbs.

If you are a civ that gets a high HP cavalry unit, you can throw that in the front to give your other units a chance. This is especially useful since the turks can't make halbs (even pikes) and have to rely on camels, yet another heavy gold unit with heavy gold upgrades. Paladins are a good option, having the HP to survive janissary and bombard cannon shots, while also having the mobility needed to get to the cannons/janisarries up close and kill them. War and battle elephants lack the speed, but make up for it with even higher HP and therefore   better  tanking abilities. Sure, janissaries can even take out heavy cavalry in large numbers, but that leaves them vulnerable to things like skirms or onager shots while they are busy killing the cavalry. Though not as good as melee cavalry, ranged heavy cavalry like the war wagon and elephant archer might be put to good use depending on the situation.

Lastly, arbalests and most archer unique units are a great counter to janissaries, due to a combination of accuracy and firing rate (and depending on the situation some range). In a fight between 20 arbalests and 20 janissaries, each time one side fires, one unit gets killed on the other side. The arbalests fire almost twice as fast, and can use their ballistics upgrade to hit and run in order to partially dodge some shots, while janissaries can't do that due to lacking ballistics. Of course, both arbalests and janissaries need protection. The afformentioned trash and heavy cavalry come to mind.

In black forest and other chokepoint-oriented maps, however, the turk army becomes MUCH harder to fight. The above strategies stop working as well. I really haven't found a surefire way to deal with this, but I have had some success with two things: Firstly, try to widen the chokepoints with onagers to give yourself more fighting room and make use of the above strategies. Secondly, though the janissaries and bombard cannons have good range, they can be outranged by longbowmen and trebuchets. Since the battlefront line moves much slower, you have a chance to use massed trebuchets to deal some damage to his massed janissaries and outranged bombard cannons. Also, it is especially important to pray to Thor that the turk isn't that good with micro.

As you said, the Turk early-mid imperial army is pretty damn powerful. But as you can see, it can be countered and killed. Even stalling is enough, since once the gold runs out and the game turns into a trash war, the turks are pretty much the worst of the worst. The turks are widely seen by mid-high level players as one of the worst 1v1 civs in the game, they have trouble surviving until their early imperial golden period and after that is gone they become the worst. In team games, however, they become so much better. The unit combination you mentioned becomes so much harder to deal with if: the turks have the trade gold to sustain it, they have halberdier support from another civ, they get slung resources and make it earlier, they can throw in some super powerful trash genitours, etc. Turks are my favourite team game civ.

Anyway, hope this essay helps someone, Rigi out.