Ideas on Ethiopia

[helln00]

So I wanted to try playing Ethiopia and wanted to float a few ideas:

Oromos - how to to use this unit? on paper I think its a unit with an interesting niche, like a musket on horses - In practice from trying it out it kinda behaves like china's forbidden army, you can charge in and attack with the front units tanking and the back units firing with little pathing problems and in large masses its almost unkillable with 30 range armour, backed up by abuns and monestaries

But its a 3 pop unit and very hard to mass, it cost the same as cuirs and I think kinda fits in the same role, but ethiopia doesn't have france's eco I feel, especially now, so how should this unit be used? like cuirs as a sort of tank/finisher in low numbers or should it be massed.

weird trade boom build - Ethiopia has access to a card that gives TP +30% income, which is ok but......if you age to age 2 with somali, there is a tech that also gives 30% trade income, giving you 60% increase total (and also increases coin gathering by 10%), want to see if this can be strung into a TP boom somehow but the lack of 1 cow makes this kinda hard

any thoughts?

[duckzilla]

I'm curious about hearing anything positive about Oromo Warriors. To me, they are one of the worst units in the game. They are as expensive (both res/pop wise!) as a cuir but perform worse in the most important melee cav statistic: hp. They have a range of 12 but their ranged rate of fire scales between 4 at max range (12) and 1.5 at min range (2). While that might sound interesting on paper (similar to forbidden army, as you already say), I find it very hard to micro Oromo Warriors in this way, because your ranged Oromos don't chase, fall behind and lose rate of fire quickly. You have to manually move them closer to the enemy from time to time, but without accidently selecting your melee Oromos in order to avoid dps losses. To me, this feels just a mess to do properly within a fight with many different units.

I could be wrong on this one, but I think that Oromo Warriors even have the ranged cav tag, which means that skirms perform significantly better against them, thereby exacerbating the hp problem. So the question is: what exactly do you want to counter with Oromos? And are you sure that Ethiopia doesn't have better options to do that?

[fei123456]

Oromo don't have ranged cavalry tag. They're just too fragile so that skirms kill them fast.

[Kawapasaka]

They're very bad. Shotels are pretty good and get upgraded by vet/guard infantry so there's no reason to ever make these.

[Garja]

Oromo are great actually but just like cuirs early on they can hardly justify their price. After the card and with a bit of mass it's easily one of the best cav in the game. I'd use them in melee pretty much always.

[duckzilla]

Oromo are great actually but just like cuirs early on they can hardly justify their price. After the card and with a bit of mass it's easily one of the best cav in the game. I'd use them in melee pretty much always.

Which card do you refer to? The 20%dmg/10% RR one?

[Garja]

Ye that card. Also they don't autoupgrade by just aging, which is a downside.

[DragonFruit]

weird trade boom build - Ethiopia has access to a card that gives TP +30% income, which is ok but......if you age to age 2 with somali, there is a tech that also gives 30% trade income, giving you 60% increase total (and also increases coin gathering by 10%), want to see if this can be strung into a TP boom somehow but the lack of 1 cow makes this kinda hard

I think it is probably only worth it for 4+ tp maps. For 3 tp stagecoach, 30% income is only worth like 3-3.5 unupgraded vills and there are better/safer age 2 eco shipments. I tried something along the lines of 2v+abun -> 700w (to finish tp line/get stagecoach/gascenya) -> TP card. It seemed like I lost a lot of tempo by aging Somali for the tech so it is probably only good vs passive civs/players. It was pretty fun and with both techs I had like 8-10 extra villagers on top of stagecoach + 10% mining though it probably only worked out since my opponent did not do much in age 2.

Recently I've been enjoying aging Habesha and immediately turning the gold into abuns. Due to the abun buff, it essentially makes it a 3 vill + 200-250w age up.

[helln00]

weird trade boom build - Ethiopia has access to a card that gives TP +30% income, which is ok but......if you age to age 2 with somali, there is a tech that also gives 30% trade income, giving you 60% increase total (and also increases coin gathering by 10%), want to see if this can be strung into a TP boom somehow but the lack of 1 cow makes this kinda hard

I think it is probably only worth it for 4+ tp maps. For 3 tp stagecoach, 30% income is only worth like 3-3.5 unupgraded vills and there are better/safer age 2 eco shipments. I tried something along the lines of 2v+abun -> 700w (to finish tp line/get stagecoach/gascenya) -> TP card. It seemed like I lost a lot of tempo by aging Somali for the tech so it is probably only good vs passive civs/players. It was pretty fun and with both techs I had like 8-10 extra villagers on top of stagecoach + 10% mining though it probably only worked out since my opponent did not do much in age 2.

Recently I've been enjoying aging Habesha and immediately turning the gold into abuns. Due to the abun buff, it essentially makes it a 3 vill + 200-250w age up.

there is an abun buff? arent those things strong enough already lol

[DragonFruit]

weird trade boom build - Ethiopia has access to a card that gives TP +30% income, which is ok but......if you age to age 2 with somali, there is a tech that also gives 30% trade income, giving you 60% increase total (and also increases coin gathering by 10%), want to see if this can be strung into a TP boom somehow but the lack of 1 cow makes this kinda hard

I think it is probably only worth it for 4+ tp maps. For 3 tp stagecoach, 30% income is only worth like 3-3.5 unupgraded vills and there are better/safer age 2 eco shipments. I tried something along the lines of 2v+abun -> 700w (to finish tp line/get stagecoach/gascenya) -> TP card. It seemed like I lost a lot of tempo by aging Somali for the tech so it is probably only good vs passive civs/players. It was pretty fun and with both techs I had like 8-10 extra villagers on top of stagecoach + 10% mining though it probably only worked out since my opponent did not do much in age 2.

Recently I've been enjoying aging Habesha and immediately turning the gold into abuns. Due to the abun buff, it essentially makes it a 3 vill + 200-250w age up.

there is an abun buff? arent those things strong enough already lol

Yep. Last patch they had their gold gather rate buffed from 0.72 to 0.86 so they went from being worth 1.2 villagers to being worth 1.43 villagers (so not quite 1.5 but close enough). The same happened to the mountain monasteries (in addition to making them 150w). I assume to compensate they removed 4 villagers and they also made Abuns 2 pop.

[fei123456]

Abun and monastery is cost-effective indeed. 2 monastery and 5 abun is 6.02 coin/s, which is faster than 2 banks/1 factory, and it benefits from market techs. You can even send 3 abuns to have ~4 banks eco before 5:30.
However, without dervish it's quite hard to hold any enemy. You can only train shotel gascenya (may add a few javelin but it doesn't make a difference), which is quite dumb.

[DragonFruit]

I think desert archers may be able to round out the unit comp but I'm not too sure what I think about them. To me they seem to become obsolete in age 3 which would make it feel bad to use the pop reduction card for them. And that long range animation is very annoying.

[Zeus]

Oromo warriors are shit units, 300 cost in resources and 3 pop. Can't really mass them with Ethiopia eco and there are better alternatives for whatever role you are trying to fulfill with them.
Somalis are the new dervish, I believe they have 25 range or so in age 2 and can kite whatever they want. Imagine a musk with 12 range trying to pressure you and you just kill them with your Somalis while kiting him for days. They can't really catch up, add to that a few javelin riders for any potential cav and your all set ( Saw it done by Sepoyguy, shit was hilarious)