Gileadite Archers

[Lingchih]

The Gileadite Archers of Ashdod are very nice units. They use special longbows, have high hp and armor, and can fight in melee in a pinch.

They are really tough to mass though. Even with the best scales, how do you gather enough of the 45 gold 49 resources archers together?

I propose you never will. You may have 10 of them, or maybe 20 if you have been hoarding them for a while. Not really cost-efficient when you probably have an indy province that can produce regular archers at 1/4 the cost.

That said, I think Gileadite Archers should get a boost in precision. They are at 10 now, which is not great. These guys should be specialists... master archers. I think a precision bump to 12 or more is greatly needed to make them cost effective.

[Sombre]

They're pretty similar to the Hinnom armoured archers yar?

I did occasionally use those as a resource sink, but I was never able to get more than 4 or 5 in a little group together and I never based a strategy around them. I do think they'd be more useful with a small boost to their precision, since you can never really get enough of them to justify basing your strat around them. Having a small knot of very accurate very hard to kill archers would be useful as a support to other strats though.

[MaxWilson]

Well, they do show up in PD, where they're middling-okay. I tend to think they're too expensive (in gold terms) to be worth massing over human slingers. I do sometimes include a handful of Gileadite Archers as archer decoys and/or Soul Vortex batteries--they're much more durable than human slingers.

I'd probably be more willing to cart Gileadite Archers along if they had mapmove 2 like everybody else.

-Max

[Endoperez]

While it would certainly make the unit more balanced, would giving Ashdod mapmove 2, precision 12 Gileadite Archers be good from nation vs nation perspective?

[MaxWilson]

Whoa there! I never said I thought they *should* have mapmove 2. (Sorry if that was unclear in context.) Heavily-armored archers usually don't. All I meant was that the low mapmove results in me building Bashanites as a resource sink instead of Gileadite Archers, unless I'm on hilly terrain anyway. I am quite happy to have Gileadite archers be useful for a specific niche.

For what it's worth, I think Ashdod is awesome enough without needing a boost to Gileadite archer precision. It would be like giving Vanir infantry tower shields.

-Max

P.S. On the other hand, I sure wish I could think of a good use for the Amorites. Maybe in the midgame against thugs? Giants with weak poison weapons just seem kind of weird to me--but I haven't tried them out. <one quick test later> Actually the Amorites are pretty cool. Spears make them more survivable than Bashanites actually because of repel (and they have the same defense), while strong poison (2 damage per turn?) makes up for the lost damage. Only average morale, but not bad really. They actually did a better job than the Bashanites at killing off one of my thugs (because of the poison).

[Kuritza]

MA Bakemono samurai archers are are whole lot better, and it doesnt make Bakemono overpowered, does it?

[MaxWilson]

I don't quite follow. MA Shinuyama has some Dai Bakemonos with longbows (less damage than Gileadite bows). Is that what you mean? Slightly better precision (+1) than Gileadite Archers, slightly less resource cost, significantly less gold cost (45 -> 30), half as many hit points, better mapmove.

But regardless, I think Ashdod is awesome enough already, and the Gileadite Archer has a niche. If the devs increased Gileadite archer precision on the grounds that e.g. long-lived giant races have more time to practice archery, I'd be okay with it, but I would not do so myself because I'm not sure it's thematic.

-Max

[Taqwus]

Ashdod does already seem to have a pretty good military machine backed by interesting magic.

If you want to mass the archers... at least they're not capitol-only. Probably better to use these with their 50-square range on 'fire at rear' with a hope of killing mages, and use ordinary archers for killing enemy archers or firing indiscriminately into a melee.

[Endoperez]

Units can't Fire Rear.

[Lingchih]

You can use Fire Enemy Monsters, which will sometimes target high HP units in the rear, if there are any back there.