Hussar is not an ideal meatshield vs Goth considering how dirt cheap thier halb is. Their tech tree is not as bad as many people think. Even after managed to build mass scorpion, Goth player can raid eco without engaging fight with scorpion in open map. Huskarl and infantry spam come faster than deathball of mass scorpion. Huskarls are much faster and high PA of huskarl negate more than half of the damage from Scorpion. Scorpion is very expensive / slow and hard to upgrade to heavy scorpion in early imp. It just work in theory but different in reality. The only way I can see huskarls winning that sort of fight is if they somehow come in super spread out from every possible angle which even on open maps isn’t likely given there’s often forward buildings/woodlines blocking several angles. Scorpions are specifically designed to counter exactly those units when massed, especially when you’re khmer. Among all 39 civs, it’s healthy to have some who actually lack any eco bonus, please release yourself from this systematic approach. You’re just doing the very convinient thing, giving Goths an eco bonus, bravo, what’s next, giving eco bonus to Magyars, Byzantines, Bulgarians and Portuguese and we’re going to end up with a very uninspired game, relying on methodical thinking rather than inovative design. The rest, 35, just fall into either defeat or being slowly drain out of gold due to inefficiency dealing with infantry swarm. In order to deal with it you gotta have a very unique Infantry civ, which there are like 5 of them. Goths Infantry spam is the strongest reliable late game in AOE, even better than Magyas composition, putting aside fantasy armies like War Elephants. Regarding TG, there is no counter to mass of War Elephants in AOE, it’s the most pop AND res efficient unit in the game, the ONLY Halb that attempts to even counter them is the Goths Halb, which is the best one universally due to: training time, cost and 10 extra pop bonus. I get these unicorn Infantry civs: Aztecs, Japanese, Slavs, Bulgarians and Teutons, but Celts? Turks? meh and the most weird one, Khmer? Khmer is known to auto-lose vs Infantry civs.

Age of empires 2 goths build order