Mongols
Cavalry ArchersTeam Bonus
Scout Cavalry-line +2 line of sight
Stop searching after the game
The coach calls out counters live, the moment the unit shows up.
Try it freeOverview
"The Mongols are a cavalry archer civilization with fast hunters, fast-attacking cavalry archers, and light cavalry with extra HP."
Civilization Bonuses
- 1
Hunters work +40% faster
- 2
Cavalry Archers attack +25% faster
- 3
Scout Cavalry-line and Steppe Lancers +20/30% HP in Castle/Imperial Age
Unique Units
Unique Technologies
Just lost against this unit?
Your coach names the counters during the match — not once the game is over.
Other Civilizations
AoE Coach analysis
Context & meta
Mongols are built on hunting and on movement. Hunters work 40% faster, which turns the deer and boar near the Town Center into an opening no other civilization can copy; cavalry archers attack 25% faster; and the Scout Cavalry line and Steppe Lancers gain +20% HP in the Castle Age and +30% in the Imperial Age. Drill, their Imperial unique technology, moves Siege Workshop units 50% faster, which is what keeps a Mangudai-and-siege army mobile. The package contains no defensive bonus and nothing that produces resources once the hunt is gone: it is designed to convert an early lead into map control.
History & balance
Mongol design is unusual in what it refuses to give. There is no defensive bonus, no lasting economic engine, nothing that rewards a long game — the whole package pays out early and then stops. A civilization built that way does not have a late-game plan so much as a late game it must already have earned. That makes it one of the most demanding designs in the game, because every advantage it grants expires by construction and is meant to be spent before it does. Played cautiously it is ordinary; played as intended it takes the map before the opponent has finished building an answer.
In pro play
Spend the hunt immediately: the food it saves only matters if it turns into an earlier age-up or an earlier attack, and a Mongol player who banks it has converted a unique advantage into an ordinary one. From there, keep the army on the opponent's economy rather than in front of their army, and pick fights you can leave. Add siege as soon as the raiding stops paying, because it moves with you rather than behind you. The one thing to avoid is a long, static game against a civilization with a real late-game plan — that is the ground the package was never built for.
How to counter it
Skirmisher mass is the textbook anti-Mangudai answer but Mongol speed makes Skirms hard to land on. Cataphracts (Byzantines) with Logistica trample-damage Mangudai mass — the cleanest hard counter. Eagle Warriors (Aztecs, Mayans) dodge well but lose if Mongols transition to Hussar+Onager. The map-control counter: forward-Castle the Mongol gold mining sites. Mongols can't produce Mangudai without gold, so denying that resource collapses their late-game. On Arabia, Knights pressure the Mongol player's villager economy in early Castle Age — they have no Bloodlines (true) so Mongol Scouts/Hussars are slightly behind in HP.