Skirmisher cost no food, and no additional would cost. Skirmisher gain plus 1 attack per age, starting in feudal. A total of plus 3 in the Imperial Age. How much of a nightmare would this be vs archer civs? Would Mayans be toast trying to fight this civ with their archers?
The function of the civ is to shutdown archer civs. And force them to make non archer units.
Skrim will basically become new archer with this huge amount of bonuses.
This is a bad idea. It would just force Mayans to make eagles
And would also be quite OP too
castle age 7 attack skirm are not terrified of knights. With no gold requirement they can be produced much faster than archers as well. They (with some monks / knights / pikes) will just destroy everything lol
Also they would literally cost half as much as archers
I’ve thought about a Skirmisher UT turning their pierce attack into a melee attack, as a fun idea.
But then I started thinking about it and most units usually have higher PA than MA, so it’d make them even worse vs other units and better vs Archers which they counter anyway. 
I think the only way this could work is if the extra bonus damage is only vs. archery range units. Their attack damage vs. infantry and cavalry would have to remain the same as it is now, otherwise they would be totally OP
It’s an interesting Question actually.
With the Dravidians we now have a civ with 25 % faster firing skirms. But it doesn’t look like it would cause any Problem. I don’t know yet how Dravidians perform against Archer civs in general but it would be interesting to see.
We also have already Vietnamese, Mayans and Aztec skirms that effectively deal +1 damage with the uniquue techs.
But in my opinion all the trash/counter unit have kinda small potential for civ bonusses as if they are overbuffed they make one of the basic game strategies basically impossible. It’s less about “too strong” but more about “civ win” etc.
It’s fine that there are civs with kinda small bonusses to certain trash units but I would actually prefer if the trash units in general could see small buffs to make it more revarding to try “active defence” with them instead of just walling.
And ofc with generally buffed Trash there is even less space for civ bonusses.
But is it so bad? I think only civs that basically need it (like mentioned dravidians as a pure infantry civ) should get a specific trash bonus to cover their weakness.
It could work but would need a gold cost. It becomes a power unit with that damage level, even if the dps is not on par with archers they are hugely more resilient.
So might be simpler to have a UU (like the shiv or eagle)
If you want them to shut down archer civs and force them to make non-archer units, you need to increase the bonus damage of the Skirmishers. The way you have buffed them - giving them extra general damage output - makes the Skirmishers better against everything else. I reckon with micro they would even trade cost effectively vs the Knight line. So this is definitely OP.
Yeah that’s exactly why I proposed the skirmisher Fire rate increase that now is with the dravidians.
I’m kinda happy with them so far, though dravidians as a whole civ… kinda suck…
(I think better ROF > higher bonus damage also bec of the overkill + micro implications)
We already have a Skirmisher civ, Vietnamese, it may be a poor design, but that’s what they had in mind, Rattan is a Skirmbalester. And you have the Imperial Skirmisher on top.
All meso civs can be considered as skirmisher civs besides viet.
errr, it’s kinda OP because you end up with 1 archery range unit that can do everything. so it’s a big No for me.
Also, we already have a lot of civs with skirms bonus to deal with archer push like Viet, Mayan, Aztec, Dravidian, Byzantin, Lithuanian.