So after playing A LOT of united States, one of the biggest issues I’ve found is countering cavelry, and I’ma go in depth with all the details. Simply put, united States needs better anticav, and I think carbonires are in desperate need if a buff
Including all of united States options (not including random mercenaries) that you can actually get in a game with 100 percent certainty, united States has 5 units with multipliers against cavelry. They are as follows:
The Tercios: Spanish pikemen you can call instead of minutemen after sending spanish immigrants, an age 1 card that costs 300 food. It’s actually a very solid shipment and I use it in plenty of strategies. The Tercios are very good units, but they are borderline impossible to mass and because of this can only really effectively counter raids and small cavelry support forces, and only if you happen to have minutemen available at the time
The Cowboys: one of the 5 units united States can get 100 percent of the time at the saloon, cowboys act as outlaw dragoons, and are very good at what they do. However in order to use them you are forced into a mercenary build, and need to send advanced saloon and dance hall for the population, as cowboys take up 6 population at base level, once again, making them difficult to mass
The carbonires: United States exclusive dragoons that are really cool in concept, as they shoot 2 shots in rapid succession. Available in age 3, but with a shipment can be trained in age 2, these units… Are not very good. Don’t get me wrong it’s still a dragoon, but just about every other dragoon unit is better in my experience. They’re just not that great
The Regulars: one if the bread and butter units of united States, regulars are solid musketeers, and like every other musketeer, they counter cav in melee. These are generally the go to when countering hang cavelry as there are easy to mass, and generally get the job done, but there’s a problem, and I’ll get to it later
Dragoons: united States can send a card in age 3 that ships dragoons and allows them to be trained at forts. These dragoons are easily the best anti cav they have access too, but once again, there are problems with them. Mainly the difficulty to mass, just like every other anti cav unit above except the regulars, and the crappy carbonires. These dragoons take extra long to train, and can only be trained from forts, and in most united States games, that will mean you’ll either have 0, 1, or 2 buildings to train them from (united States can get 5 or 6 forts, but it takes a long time to pull off)
Now let’s talk about regulars. As mentioned before, they can generally get the job done, but their problem is that they aren’t amazing, they’re just okay. Simply put, if a cab focused civ makes an army of just cav and throws it into the regulars, it’s a toss up who will come out victorious. I recently had a game where I had an army of veteran regulars with the united States army shipment against an army of veteran ulhans. Every battle either ended in a draw, or with my army getting bowled over despite my lead in score. Granted it took him a long time to kill me, but he was able to overcome my anticav with EXCLUSIVELY ulhans without ever switching to cannons or skirms or even supplementing with them. This issue can also be seen with currasiers, but they kind of do that to everyone, so it’s not the best example. Regulars don’t specialize in anticav, and so will lose battles that pikes, dops, samurai, and night anti cav specialized units would not
Something else of note is the minutemen and marines. I discovered the other day what while they have great stats, Marines and minutemen don’t actually have multipliers against cav. Their multipliers are actually against seige units (like petards and rams) and artillery. This surprised me, and I think it’s worth noting for anyone under artillery fire in their games
Now let’s talk about upgrades and cards. Not including advanced arsenal, united States has 1 card that boosts regulars (it’s very good why you should always take it) and 1 entire card that boosts any cavelry (compared to the 4 cards dedicated to infantry, not including age up cards) that one card boosting cavelry is not available until AGE 4, and it buffs ONLY carbonires, not huss. And when I say it buffs only carven years I mean it lists them by name, not ranged cavalry. If it was range cavalry I would send that and spam the dragoons instead.
What does this buff provide? A 25 percent damage increase, with no HP increase. While this is good on paper it still falls short of making carbonires good, it just makes them slightly better than the dragoons of other civs, not including cards.
As you can see, to overwhelm a United States player, all you need to do is reason highly buffed cav and you can roll right over them. If the carbonires were to be buffed, the issue would be solved, but until then, united States will have this huge glaring weakness
