The new female unit for Malians, does someone here have any good source material for this? I was trying to google this and was unable to find anything related to a female warrior
I asked the same question on AOE history discord and thanks to one of their members for posting this. It is from “In Search of Sunjata, The Mande Oral Epic as History, Literature and Performance” on Google Books.
The history of Mandinka peoples of the Mali empire is mostly oral history - there is a lot less written history compared to Eurasia. So obviously we have no way for sure of knowing how much is true or not, but I think the fact that they pulled such an obscure reference and turned it into a unit shows that they did a fair bit of research.
The Musofadi gunner is an obvious reference though to the Dahomey Amazons which is quite anachronistic (they were from the 1800s!). But I guess it was a way for them to still get a hand cannonneer type unit while making it unique somehow.
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Thank you, it would be nice if Relic can put some historic background information for units, like an internal wiki.
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You mean kinda like AoE3?
The source is AoE2. In that game they gave Mali a unit called the Gbeto which was the precursor to the Dahomey Amazons. They are actually from Benin not Mali, but in the days of AoE2 they didn’t care so much about that. And since the devs are set on replicating all the worst aspects of AoE2 (such as javelins somehow beating archers) they just copied that.