I’ve been watching some pro level Sicilian matches to see how they fare against infantry civs and they seem to be having the same problem I do. When Sicilians fight anyone with strong infantry they seem to be lacking counters. Sicilians lack both Hand Cannons and Thumb Ring, as well as Ring Archer Armor so they don’t have an effective counter with archers.
Here’s a really good match of Hera (Sicilians) vs Yo (Burgundians).
Hera has some absolutely amazing Siege Onager micro where he’s seemingly countering the Burgundian 2H Swords with pure Onager micro. In the end, he just gets overwhelmed because any civ with good MAA (or even an infantry unique that beats the Serjeant) can just spam infantry and Sicilians will fold to them. He theorizes that maybe he should have tried Heavy Scorpions but ultimately admits he feels they wouldn’t have worked and then goes on to say that he felt he played extremely well he just had no way to counter simple Militia line spam as Sicilians.
Considering how expensive the Serjeant is it’s kind of silly how ineffective it is outside of killing trash and archers, which it does pretty slowly anyway due to its low attack and move speed (same move speed as MAA but combined with the attack being lower results in longer time to kill things).
I think it would be interesting to give Sicilians Thumb Ring which would allow them to field archers mid to late game and synergize them with Donjons for shooting extra arrows. It’d be a pretty fun combo to field while playing Sicilians, but very gold intensive to use alongside Serjeants so it’d require a lot of aggression to secure gold to keep up the combo.