hey guys spirit of the lawhere in this video we're going to be taking a quick look at the
hindustani's new unique unit the ghulam remember the hindustanis are the reworked version of what
used to be the indians and part of the whole dlc expansion restructuring has been to take
the elephant archer from the indians and make it a regional unit that means hindustanis of course
need a new unique unit and it's ended up being this spear infantry now you might be thinking
what is a civilization with faster attacking camel riders the imperial camel and halberdiers need
with yet another anti-cavalry option if that's the mindset you have going into this then get ready to
throw out everything you think you know about spear units because this one is actually weak
to cavalry so how does that work let's start with their stats in castle h here i have a few
different units for comparison and if we look at the pikeman you can see it's not really a match
the ghulam has significantly more attack pierce armor and even hp so it really doesn't pass
the eye test the long swordsman is in fact a lot closer the gulem's higher pierce armor stands out
but other than that the two units seem roughly in line with one another of course the king of
high pierce armor in castle age is the huskarl which retains its throne and while you can see the
ghulam has good pierce armor it's not quite on the same level at a glance i think it's fair to say
the unit is part way between a long swordsman and huskarl and its cost is also in line with those
two units in that 75 to 80 resource range albeit with a higher gold cost in terms of upgrades it's
about what you'd expect for an infantry unit with barracks blacksmith infantry techs and its elite
upgrade at the castle the elite upgrade actually doubles its base pierce armor from three to six
getting pretty close to the elite huskers eight base pierce armor so especially in the late game
it's going to be quite resistant to arrows in fact they'd have the same 10 pierce armor as the elite
huskarl if not for lacking the final armor upgrade they also have a 12 second creation time which is
pretty standard for infantry at the castle so far we seem to have an infantry that's very sturdy
against range units which would be a reasonable identity on its own but the unit also has an
extra twist they have the unique ability of being able to attack through enemy units now we've seen
something like this before with the kamiyuk though the cameo stats show extra range whereas the gulam
doesn't so how did they compare in this test i have both attacking the first unit in the line
and interestingly you can see the ghulam is doing full damage to its target and half damage
to the unit behind it whereas the kamiyuk is only attacking the unit in front in contrast if i have
them both attack the second unit in the line the cameo can reach over the first to hit it whereas
the ghulam has to run around and be right next to it you can see that while they kind of get at the
same thing of having extra reach they're doing it in very different ways the cameo's ability
seems better with multiple rows where you can get more units involved to gang up on single targets
whereas the ghulam has just the front row of units attacking but is able to hit
multiple rows of enemies at once is one of these abilities necessarily better than the other though
for what it's worth in a direct fight with equal total resources the outcome is effectively a draw
that's a pretty satisfying result as it fits nicely with the narrative that it's sort of
doing the same thing in a different way but as we'll see later i think the cameos ability
actually holds it better against mass infantry but now let's consider what role they're designed to
fill and i think a revealing way to do that is to look at their bonus damage it turns out they don't
take bonus damage from very much except units like the hand cannoneer since the ghulam is after all
infantry flipping things around you can see they have a bonus against archers but no bonus against
either infantry or notably cavalry in this case that makes them feel again closer to the huskarl
than the kamayuk and in fact the more i use the unit the more it feels like a blend between the
two though closer to a huskarl one last hidden feature about the unit is that it also has
very good speed nearly on the same level as the gbetoi suspect that's another way to try to give
them a leg up on archers and after squires they start to even leave plumed archers in the dust
so to put it all together what exactly is the role of this unit hindustanis no longer have the
tanky elephant archer they weren't given battle elephant and they also have no heavy cavalry so
some common tools that other civilizations use to soak up archer fire is missing from the sieve with
the ghulam they have an extra deterrent for an opponent spamming nothing but archers as between
their speed pierce armor bonus damage and even their pass through attack they cut through archers
in a way that looks an awful lot like huskarls initially i expected the pass-through damage would
make them effective against mass infantry as well as unlike eagle warriors who ghulam shares some
similarities with they don't take bonus damage from champions still with equal resources even
champions without supplies come out looking very strong with a much lower gold investment of course
they can handle halberdiers which isn't saying very much as that's basically an anti-cavalry
specialist if their pass-through damage made it seem like they'd be strong against everything
then consider even hazards get sort of close with equal numbers to handling them in melee and
of course fully upgraded paladins even outnumbered almost two to one to balance resources come out in
decent shape it seems cavalry don't need a bonus to be a good counter as the tooltip suggests so
there you have it they're an anti-arch unit with an interesting but ultimately in my opinion a bit
of an underwhelming secondary ability i hope this unit gets a lot more use than the indians elephant
archer used to and i'm curious to see especially how mayan players are going to try to answer it
that's all for this one though thanks for watching guys and i'll see you next time
you