African Civs, How do you Deal with Falconets?

I don’t think there is a good answer to this other than catching them out of position or taking very poor trades to power through.

  • Shotels are low health and have low base attack so they’re pretty bad at dealing with cannons.
  • Desert Raiders are too expensive and high pop.
  • Culverins have a huge upfront cost that’s basically unaffordable in most games.
  • Oromos are a lot better now, but their charged shot can delay them from getting on top of cannons and give your opponent an extra second or two to get units in place to screen them from melee.
  • Sebastopol Mortars do x0.1 vs artillery and are massively expensive.
  • Daroods are an okay option against the 2 falc shipment, but countering cannons with infantry is not usually viable.
  • Javelin Riders in melee is probably the only reliable option to deal with lots of cannons.

Ethiopia was kinda left in a bad spot after their strong outlaw and dervish strategies were nerfed into the ground. They could use some buffs to their other units to compensate. I think some buffs like this could help:

Shotels: reduce their attack by 1 but increase their RoF to 1 (equivalent to +1.75 attack on a regular melee unit)

Sebastopol Mortar: change their artillery multiplier to x0.5, and give them x1.5 versus infantry

Training European artillery should be reworked to function like the pseudo-shipments from the Italian Basilica. They could be available without needing to research a tech, but would share the shipment queue and would be one at a time. Researching a “European Advisors” tech could represent bringing in foreign expertise to make them domestically. This could make them available to be trained in batches and not use the shipment queue. It could also alter their cost to something like 400 influence/100 wood to make them a little more affordable.

Fields could also be made less tedious so they’re not such a big distraction when you’re trying to transition from natural resources.

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