Mounted Crossbowman: regional mounted archer units for most civs with Mediterranean, Central and Western European architectures (Byzantines, Vikings and the Caucasian civs would retain Cav Archers).
HP: 45
1 Melee and Pierce armor
Pierce attack: 7
Attack bonus: +2 again infantry
Speed: 1.35
Slower fire rate than Cav Archers
Why would vikings have CA?
Unit that gets a 2nd life but unlike Konnik doesn’t change its type.
Crossbows were extremely uncommon in Scandinavia during the Viking period iirc. If the Viking split becomes real, I guess Danes and Swedes could get Mounted Xbows while Vikings/Norse/Norwegians would stay with Cav Archers
What about a unit that is trained at half life?
I had considered something like this for a unit that is a squadron. A good contender is the Tangut Sparrowhawks which were a small squad of cavalry. In this case you train 2 at a time and they are linked essentially as one unit doing 2 attacks per swing and costing 1.5 pop slots being incredibly pop efficient but not great for covering ground. When killed the first time, one of the riders dies and it becomes a one pop individual horseman and strikes once per swing instead. So essentially, the unit becomes more pop inefficient as a penalty for dying but having more pop to spread around the map is good. Better for long pitched battles
Then you need to heal it? That will be too much time consuming.
One issue I see is this unit will take 2 tiles on the map and will cause pathing issues and will get stuck in narrow places.This would be 2 units annexd together similar to a sail and ship hull but with different pop costs.
I don’t see why they can’t be scrunched together to be 1 tile since they fight as one. I mean some units have different sized circles. Knights and militia have different circles for instance
It would stack on top of the other,thats how the game works now.
I’m particularly thinking here about stuff like the jian swordsman which has an insane timing powerspike but falls off later heavily. This could be corrected with starting at half-life.
PS: the other way around could also start with some “overlife”. Needs to be a castle UU that is probably similar to some standard unit and therefore some initial encouragement to make. Could be a cav UU or something like that (siege is also thinkable).
An “anti dodge shield”. Basically the inverse of a shrivamsha.
Whenever a targeted unit somehow dodges a projectile of that unit (projectile doesn’t damage anything) then this archer unit fires one more projectile in the next volley. This stacks, so if it already fires 9 projectiles and all of them miss, the next volley will be 10 projectiles.
(ofc it WILL also add up against shrivamshas. So every time a projectile is absorbed by a shrivamsha this will also basically count as a “miss”)
Still wishing that Shrivamsha was just an “auto micro” unit (they’d dodge the projectiles on their own just as a skilled player or a computer would do) instead of having that Protoss shield. It doesn’t feel like “dodging” at all.
Easier way to fix that would be to give it a deflect graphic when a projectile hits it.
Yeah. The ability should be called absorbing and not dodging.
New gimmick: Negates “ignore armor” effects.
the ability shouldn’t exist at all
A unit with the charge attack/move ability but only works on certain types of units like villagers or buildings.dont ask me why one would charge head on to a wall 
Actually…
As we lately had so many units which special abilities work against everything except buildings and siege… A unit that specifically charges against those could be interesting. Issue could be ofc that as a melee unit we already have tarkans and elephants and coustillier (against siege effectively). And for Archers there are Mangudai and Fire Archers - and the unit needs to be balanced aswell.
What about a “digging” unit that can move undergroud to damage enemy buildings (needs to be terrible against TCs though). Or just to bypass walls and get in to raid?
I always thought an actual sapper would be cool to have but its not easy to design it.main issue is how do you counter it?
How I envisioned it was you build a sapper tunnel entrance which would be similar to a tower with a range.then you manually select the target within the range and the tunnel will start going in a straight line damaging or out right destroying anything on its path till the end target is reached.this would be like a tower with a scorpion projectile which is extremely slow and damages all the units in the path.