Malian 2nd Mastery Change?

This is not a bug but more like ask for change:

Malian 2nd Mastery: tip of the spear = kill 20 horseman with javalin throwing Donso with upgrade precision throw.

Issue is that upgrade is age 4 and likely that AI more likely to be at least age 3 and start building only Knight, not horseman.

Also, if enemy is Malian then there wouldn’t be horseman to kill (Not sure for Ottoman Sipahi, maybe count).

For now, only possible way is play multiplayer and ask opponent for help, which if not friend, may not help at all.

My suggestion is to not limit to horseman but all cavalry instead (Knight, armored elephant, scout, etc).
This would make mastery more likely to achieve.

A way to get it outside of skirmish / multiplayer is to play the new Malian Art of War Challenge, some of the enemy waves contain decent numbers of Horsemen, and you start out in Imperial Age with Precision Training researched.

I don’t think that Horseman show up often enough to complete Mastery as Cavalry is included Armored elephant and Knight.

Maybe with high skill group control Donso to spread and one shot 2-3 Horsemans in each wave might succeed, but this is mastery 2, this isn’t suppose to need high skill to complete.

Yeah, I am frustrated with this challenge. I’ve tried sending in archers and javelin throwers so that the AI starts responding with cavalry. I’ve tried depriving them of all gold so that they make horsemen instead of knights. Nothing works. I’ve seen the AI make 4-6 horsemen max before just giving up and going idle.

Well, I know I finished the challenge after first trying it in a regular game without succeeding cause if you make lots of Donso the AI avoids building Horsemen. I think it might count across games though, so I got it through combination of the challenge and a skirmish game in the end. I’d give doing the challenge a couple of times a try to see if that works, it doesn’t take that long.

Praise be to the Gods. I finally managed this.

It seems setting the AI to intermediate, and playing against 2 enemies did the trick. The easy AI does not produce horsemen no matter what, and the hard and hardest AIs keep spamming knights, and just go for infantry instead when they run out of gold.

Whichever person on the Dev team that foolishly decided that this was going to be the second mastery for the civ, I hope a bird poops on you the next time you step out of the house for an important appointment.

Thank you @Narute00100 + all. This is fantastic feedback. I’ll make sure the wider team sees this.