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Royal Merovingian Hunters

Since I felt Germanic factions lacked a relevant yet accurate archer unit so far, I designed one myself. The unit aims to be at least as history-wise as most Attila units (even though several are anti-historical or missing any consistent background), and represents the hunting retinue of the Frankish Kings. As such, these skilled marksmen are also capable in hand-to-hand combat and should hold the line with their boar spears. Their rate of fire is considerably fast due to their bows being short hunting ones.

Having some knowledge on ancient and medieval germanic societies, I found pretty stupid that no 'barbaric' faction had a dedicated archer. Ancient peoples of Germania were skilled hunters and pursued prey with javelins, bows and other weaponry. It is mentioned by one famous roman historian that they were literally "raised as hunters". Yes, I know, no tribe or G. Kingdom ever fielded large missile forces, but many TW units are actually based off elite, rare, regional forces.

In Roman law, property included the right to hunt, a concept which continued under the Frankish Merovingian and Carolingian monarchs who considered the entire kingdom to be their property, but who also controlled enormous royal domains as hunting reserves (forests).

Medieval II had the Dvor and now Attila gets this mixed melee/missile unit. Costs and statistics should be relatively balanced, but I haven't done any testing yet. It's all a mix between several units from other factions that have more or less similar values.

The unit stats and abilities are the ones as seen in the pictures. Since some may not be confident with the icons:

Shield wall, Second Wind, Quick Reload - and guerrilla deployment, resistance to fatigue and raider attributes. The latter I couldn't change much, I wanted the archers to have at least guerrilla deployment or snipe to denote their capacity to hide in order to stalk down prey. Unfortunately the skills are determined by presets and you can't pick off the attributes you want.

Note that this mod refers to the Franks faction in the Grand Campaign (Vanilla) and not the Kingdom of the Franks or whatever from AoC.

P.S.

If you're looking for units to improve your Frankish Army with, be sure to check out my tanky Frankish Custodes Defectors!