Hey guys, Spirit of the Law here.
This video is going to be focusing on dealing with and effectively using organ guns.
They're a unit that I have struggled with in the past,
especially when trying to come up with a good counter.
They've recently gone through some changes
so it seems like a good time to sit down and take a look.
Let's check 'em out.
Organ guns are the unique unit of the Portugese
from the African Kingdoms expansion.
They're 80 wood and 60 gold after the Portugese discount,
which makes them comparable in price to a scorpion.
In terms of stats, there are quite a few comparisons that can be made.
First of all, they're a gunpowder unit,
so it makes sense to compare them to other gunpowder options,
and they stack up pretty well there.
For example: their HP and armour is higher than the hand canonneer and janissary
which is balanced by their higher cost.
There's also some resemblance stats-wise to conquistadors and arambai
or as a beefier version of the scorpion line in terms of attack and armour.
Looking quickly at the elite upgrade
it adds more HP, attack and pierce armour.
It's an expensive unit in general
so you want to make sure that you upgrade them and get the most out of them that you can.
If we look at some hidden stuff,
unlike some gunpowder units, they don't require chemistry to be researched beforehand.
Some implications of their gunpowder status are they will train faster if you have a Turk ally
and they're also countered by the Italian condotierro
which does 10 bonus damage against gunpowder units.
Another hazard of being a gunpowder unit is usually relatively low accuracy
and this is especially true for the organ gun.
For a quick comparison, elite organ guns only average about 70% of their damage output from 7 tiles away
that they do from 2 tiles.
As a reference, hand canonneers do about 83% as much.
That means even within the gunpowder family
the organ gun is particularly inaccurate.
In addition to being gunpowder though, they're also a siege unit.
That means, like any other siege unit, you need redemption researched in order to convert them.
They're also repaired and not healed, which means you need a villager and it costs you wood and gold.
Another consequence is that they can't garrison in castles or anything like that.
This also has implications for how they're upgraded.
They don't benefit at all from the blacksmith and instead they're upgraded at the university.
Specifically siege engineers increases their range by 1.
You would think that they should do 20% more damage to buildings after siege engineers,
but that doesn't seem to happen in practice
and in fact they're terrible against buildings in general.
Now besides their gunpowder and siege status, they also have some other unusual qualities.
One is that they do spray damage from firing multiple shots at once,
though don't get too excited.
A lot of that is just for show and upon closer inspection
4 of the 5 projectiles only do 1 damage.
while the other does the full advertised attack.
Sometimes you see a half-damage shot and that's probably the special projectile carrying the full damage
missing its intended target and would be consistent with what I've seen before with stray arrows.
Against bunched-up units, you might assume the spray damage adds up to something significant
and it's certainly implied in the tech tree description that it does,
but it's actually not that strong.
As an example, it's nowhere near the effect size that scorpions can have
and scorpions have a big edge against units that are tightly packed together.
Another way in which they are quite comparable to scorpions, though, is their minimum range.
This was recently added and organ guns now need at least 1 tile between them and their target to start firing,
which in practice looks like they're running away from melee units.
You can offset that weakness somewhat by keeping them on "stand ground"
which means, when they're being attacked up close, they'll mostly stay put
and try to target a different unit outside of their minimum range
instead of backing up to fire at the one right in front of them.
In practice, though, this is still a big nerf
because before the minimum range, units up close were just hit with 100% accuracy.
So organ guns used to be more effective up close than they were long range.
Now, you have to take melee units a bit more seriously.
Let's dig a bit deeper, though, and see how they stack up against different types of units.
First of all, they do well against grouped-up infantry and perform basically the same as hand canonneers
but with a higher cost.
They don't have an anti-infantry bonus, but their higher attack and extra projectiles roughly balance that out.
Against infantry with high pierce armour, there is a slight edge to hand canonneers, but it's still pretty comparable.
You might think organ guns have the advantage in close combat because of their extra HP
but their minimum range means they'll spend a lot of time running away
and again come out looking pretty similar to hand canonneers.
They're also very strong against skirmishers, who only do 1 damage per shot.
To me, this is the big advantage over hand canonneers
and they hold up a lot more like scorpions against ranged units.
That's pretty unique for gunpowder, which typically gets countered very cost effectively by skirmishers.
I remember some early games around African Kingdoms' release,
where the organ gun threw off some people's intuition about that, thanks to their surprisingly high pierce armour.
If they're being attacked by skirmishers,
you can basically ignore them and focus-fire other, more expensive and threatening units.
So if infantry and archers aren't the answer, then you might try cavalry.
This is a lot more effective now that organ guns have minimum range
and even outnumbered, light cavalry can do a lot of damage.
Likewise, a large group of paladins are also going to be able to overpower them.
I find it's smart to pair organ guns with halberdiers to prevent light cavalry in particular from getting too close.
Overall, cavalry are a manageable weakness with even a pretty basic unit composition.
Their true weakness, I'd say, is other siege.
Siege onagers are the best, because they can take out several in one shot,
but even regular onagers are effective if you have enough of them.
A good idea as Portugese is to mix organ guns with bombard cannons
so they can target the onagers
and the organ guns clean up any incoming infantry or skirmishers.
In fact, that's the common Portugese late game army that I see the most.
Organ guns, bombard cannons and then adding in either halberdiers against cavalry
or bombard towers for a bit more support.
Scorpions are generally pretty effective, since organ guns work best if they're massed up in a large group.
Bombard cannons or mass trebuchets are also effective if they're defended
and if you want to go for cheese factor,
you can take out an organ gun with a ram in 2 hits.
The only siege unit I can think of that doesn't counter organ guns well is the siege tower.
It's not your fault, siege tower, it's just the way they made you.
That's all for this one. Thanks for watching, guys, and I'll see you next time.