We don’t know yet at this stage how the rocket cart works and how close its behaviour is to onagers, but since we have a month of tweaking left, I wanted to leave that thought here.
Koreans often go halbs/onagers/towers on closed maps, so you want to ensure that halbs/rocket carts doesn’t die pitifully to rams. Koreans (and everyone) can now tech faster into swordsmen, and they’ll have fire lancers too, but my concern here is less about counters being available to the civ and more about preserving the playstyle of this civ from the year 2000. It will not be preserved if rocket carts deal many tiny pierce damages.
I think if they did pierce damage, they would be replacing scorpions rather than mangonels. They need to be fairly similar to mangonels, not just for Koreans, but for the gameplay to work more generally – e.g. they need to trade one-for-one with mangonels, they need to be able to pressure town centres, etc.
Those were the days! Feels kind of bad that Koreans’ current unique techs both used to be free bonuses. (I do think the civ plays better overall these days, though.)
Yes, good point. That makes me hopeful. I would rather have melee damage, but if they choose pierce damage (because it’s arrow-like projectiles), perhaps they will deal a significant amount of anti-building + anti-siege + anti-ram damage to compensate. It’s hard to stay on pierce damage and still follow mangonels dealing 40 melee + 12 anti-siege without stacking the bonus damage part.
I forgot to mention that it’s not only rams but also skirms. While Koreans have their own discounted skirms, they like to use mangonels to support their war wagons against skirms.
I’d expect rocket carts to have every utility the mangonel line has: anti siege, anti building, good vs stacked units. If any of these is missed then it’s a huge disadvantage of the civ.
It could be a slight variant like 4 rockets of 15 attack each.