With the slow gather rate of wood the total of 80 ressources comes closer to 110, if you could have used thos wood villagers for gold gathering or even more food. And then after paying horrifcally more for them they still ■■■■■■’ suck versus muskets? Whats their excuse for still sucking ■■■?
Crossbpws are supposed to be bad and spammable, the issue is, with Plantations and Trade Posts, you have enough Gold to keep spamming Skirms instead.
Ports Corossbows are great, though, specially if you go Papal Guard.
They are not even spammable. They even suck in the timeframe they should be good in, like in early colonial. But hell no, ■■■■■■ everything kills them.
Just like Bowman in AoE1, where unless you civ gets Composite Bowman, you will never even train Foot Archers.
They are spammable, and are supposed to suck, on purpose.
You are supposed to use them as a defensive troop against Pikemen Rushes, because Pikemen have a rather decent Siege attack.
As others have indicated, they’re really only useful in Age 2 against heavy infantry or other light infantry. In Age 3, you could upgrade them to Veteran and keep using them, but IMO in Age 3 and beyond you should switch to skirms or your civ specific equivalent unit.
A good way to buff them (at least in some maps) would be to change the Tupi technology poison arrow frogs to allow all archer units to shoot poison arrows.