Currently, only Portuguese gunpowder units and Spanish Cannon Galleons benefit from Ballistics.
What if all gunpowder units had Ballistics and the Portuguese Arquebus was replaced with a different tech?
Would this be overpowered for some civilizations?
If so I would see the hand cannoneer effectively replace the archer line for most civs that have access to it, bombard cannons make onagers much less useful (sure the onager still punches harder but with the extra range of the BBC and now great accuracy…), and cannon galleons now being reliable against ships while having other ship types automatically become meat shields due to their range. Needless to say, any civ with significant bonuses for their gunpowder would be even stronger.
No need to nerf militia-line again…
I think the developers wanted to stop at the Hand cannons / Schioppi and not go exploring the Arquebus for everyone although they were widespread in the 15th century.
Perhaps in the future a civilisation will have a unique Hand Cannon upgrade.
You already know the answer, don’t you?
Which civilisation has a lot of bonuses for gunpoweder units but doesn’t have an accuracy bonus? hmm, which civ could that be?
Gunpowder UUs have been nerf one by one. And then Conquistador dominates in Arena and team games again and other gunpowder civs also overwhelm in Castle age. They will have to be nerf to oblivion then.
They could introduce a new Imperial Age tech that adds Ballistics to gunpowerder units.
Though probably just Hand Cannons because other none gunpowder siege units usually also don’t have Ballistics.
But I don’t think it’s a good idea in general.
I’d rather buff missed projectiles. What if missed shots would still do 100% damage when they hit a different unit? This would be a petty strong gunpoweder buff but only against massed enemy units. In return their accuracy could be removed, maybe even to 0% so every shot is technically a missed shot.
Thought that would require a lot of testing to make it balanced.
Aztecs and Cumans of course !!! 
While we’re at it, buff the janissary’s range to 9 (elite 10) to make the OP really happy about the Turks becoming a monster
Are Portuguese gunpowder units considered better than those of the Spanish, Hindustanis, Bohemians, or Turks?
While I’m not advocating for buffing the Janissary’s range, I wonder; if 8-range Janissaries were overpowered, then how do people counter 9-range Castle Age Briton crossbows or 12-range Longbowmen?
Portugese have that as their main bonus for gunpowder units not on top of another bonus.
Civs like Turks or Hindustani have other bonuses that would become very strong in combination with ballistics.
British archers don’t do 17 pierce damage in Castle Age. Also Britons don’t have Thumbring so lower rate of fire and lower accuracy then all the other archer civs.
For example Mangonels have 6 pierce armour and fully upgraded Castle Age Crossbows only have 7 attack so they do 1 damage vs. Mangonels. But Janissaries with their 17 pierce damage do 11 damage. That’s 11 times as much!
If gunpowder units (especially hand cannon units) can have ballistics, then their accuracy should probably be reduced in exchange. This makes sense to some extent. The handcannons of that era had poor accuracy at long range, but at least the soldiers knew to aim in the direction the enemy was moving.
When guns could penetrate plate armor, soldiers gradually gave up heavy armor. Maybe the gunpowder units’ attacks could ignore armor, and then the Hand Cannoneers could have about 25 attack and remove the attack bonus in exchange.
What made the janissary extremely strong was the range combined with the high attack, while longbowmen get most of their damage blocked against mangonels, heavy cav or skirmishers.
A very small group was enough to one-shot mangonels in impunity, while longbowmen needed a larger investment.
It’d be barely noticeable.
Ballistics and accuracy are different things is the game. With the basic miss chance gunpowder units have, being able to track the target would mean very little.
This would be strong for siege, defense and navel civs since the bombard cannons/towers, and galleons would benefit the most from this change.
How do you come to this conclusion?
No, Hindustanis’ HC are probably the strongest
But surely, if a capable crossbowman could aim at a target at a distance of 100 metres, the HandCannons / Arquebus were so inaccurate that they had 0 accuracy beyond 50 metres. In some ways the game is all too kind.
It’d be like if you ever made cavalry archers on a civ without thumb ring. The unit will target where the enemy is going, but its still going to miss as often as not.
Pretty straight forward imo.
Do Hindustani Hand Cannoneers have 75% accuracy at maximum range?
Technically yes practically no.
n% accuracy doesn’t mean that units only hit n% of the time. A missed shot goes into a random direction and can hit the intended target or a different unit.
Since the missed shots go out in a cone it means the closer you are to the targets the more likely you are to hit it with a “missed” shot.
So in some ways the increased range is actually a debuff. At 10 range a Hand Cannon hits the target less often then at 8 range.
The Fire Ship as 0% accuracy for example. Yes 0%! Every single shot is technically a miss.
Arambai have an accuracy of 20% (30% Elite) which is also very low. A group of them feels like a shotgun.
Good video about it.
So you can’t just take the accuracy number and multiply it with the DPS to see how good a unit is.
Yeah, missed shots can still land on other targets, but they deal half damage in this case.
In this video, Hindustani Hand Cannoneers easily defeat Janissaries, so they must definitely still have 75% accuracy at 9 range, and obviously more than 75% the closer they get.
I wonder if that’s more because of the armour and not because of the range.
They win against every other Hand Cannon in the video.
Also both units are not supposed to be strong against each other so it’s not really a good comparison. Are Hindustani Hand Cannons more cost effective against other units like Cavaliers or Paladins?
Also population efficiency is something that shouldn’t be ignored. Italian Hand Cannons might be cheaper but that doesn’t help you when you are pop capped. You could always use the population for other units even if it’s just more villagers.