Slingers

[...] they followed their chief to Troy,
shooting with these, salvo on pelting salvo,
they tore the Trojan battle lines to pieces. —The Iliad (cap 13)

In game

Slingers — Vital statistics
Peasants	Light missile infantry with very good range, splash damage and rate of fire, but very poor attack. Very useful for catching lightly armoured units out in the open, but performs poorly against very fast units or hardened targets. Strong versus foot archers. Weak versus cavalry buildings, siege weapons.
Prereq:	Build time	HP	LOS	Attack	Attack speed	Movement speed
None	6.6s (100t)	40	8	4	1.3s (20t)	29
Cost			Created from	Armour	Weapon range	Specialty
Base	Ramp	Pop
: 20	: 3	1		None	3-15	High min range. +1 splash radius. Best range and attack speed (compared to normal archers). Attack accuracy penalties. High damage penalties versus armoured units, heavy ships, structures and Battering Rams.

Notes

Slingers form the best long-ranged light infantry unit, being capable of lobbing rocks at a far distance. However, they have several problems - they have a glaring attack penalty against light infantry and horse cavalry (in fact the damage modifier is so low that it is effectively zero), and also don't perform well against enemy siege weapons, ships or buildings even if they have good rate of fire, they also deal the least damage compared to Archers.

Despite their weak stats, they are still dirt-cheap so as a result, the main task of Slingers is primarily meant as a "trash" unit, meant more for as a distraction than anything else. Still, should you be able to provide anti-cavalry support, Slingers can be a very effective unit, albeit you must raise vast numbers to get anything out of them. Slingers are not used by the Zhou, Bach Viet, Indians, Choson or Shang — so while many of them have unique units that obviate the need for slings, they still lack the ability to raise a body of light skirmishers whereso needed.

Unit summary

• Light ranged infantry, with very good range, but poor damage and many handicaps against various targets.
• Short of Their Targets — While they have superior attack speed and range, Slingers perform poorly if attacking anything else other than concentrations of heavy units -- against which they deal near to negligible damage.
• Mercenary Neitoitoi Slingers have a drastically reduced attack accuracy penalty, meaning that their attacks usually hit their targets more often than not.

See also

• Okhloi / Angry Mob

Trivia

• This unit is available to Poles, Bulgars and Magyars in New World Empires: Swords of the Prophets

History

The sling is a simple weapon, made of a small cradle, or pouch, in the middle of two lengths of cord. A projectile is placed in the pouch. The middle finger or thumb is placed through a loop on the end of one cord, and a tab at the end of the other cord is placed between the thumb and forefinger. The sling is swung in an arc, and the tab released at a precise moment. This frees the projectile to fly to the target.

Since ancient times, shepherds from all over the world used slings to tend their flocks by launching a stone close to a straying animal, preventing them from going to an undesired direction, and the weapon became associated with the profession. It was also commonly used to hunt small game, and its simplicity and practicality also meant that it saw combat quite often. The oldest-known surviving slings, radiocarbon dated to ca. 2500 BCE were recovered from South American archaeological sites on the coast of Peru. Since slings were made of biodegradable materials however, it's difficult to find slings in the archaeological record, but it's known its use goes way back; The first illustration of a slinger is found on the site of Çatalhöyük in Southern Anatolia, dated ca. 7,000 BCE.

Corps of slingers were common in the armies of Antiquity since the very first organized armies of the Sumerians and earlier. The best known mention of a sling is the Biblical story in the Book of Samuel, where the future king of Israel, David, a young man armed only with a sling, challenges and defeats the heavily armed Philistine champion Goliath with a single shot to the head.

References

• Fitzgerald C, How Sling Weaponry Revolutionized Warfare In The Ancient World