I recently played a game with Lucifer. It was a select your enemy game.
I gave him Carthage and he gave me Persia. Why he would do this I cant say.. cause Persia would kick Carth arse in any 1v1. I think his reasons may have been.. give the poor sucker a break or this will be a good challenge.. or maybe he just doesn’t like Persia.
Any way the result was what you may have expected but there was one unexpected twist !
Carth has no range units.. of any note and Persia has compies (albiet with a range of only 8). So I churned out compies which massacred any stable units that came nearby.
Lucifer then switched to an interesting ploy. My next attack wave of 20 compies and 2-3 camels met an upgraded force of 25 Slingers. Those compies went down like flies. I next tried with even more and included ST’s and that attack failed too.
It was frustrating that I couldn’t generate enough units to break through those slingers.. I thought they were supposed to be weak… Like anything on mass they are still useful in bronze if against mainly ranged units. Mind you they took the camels out pretty quick as well.
I wasn’t Until I had Phants that Lucifer was forced to resign. But he held out for 40-50 minutes with Carth against Persia and slingers were his mainstay force !
Now I’m not a good player of Persia. To most of you that might be obvious so there may have been a better way. I am just saying that for non-range civs like Carth Greek etc the humble slinger is a surprisingly good defensive alternative.