I understand that, but that's like saying England forces you to have a navy simply because their ua and uu benefit navies.
Surely that's closer to your argument than mine? I'm pointing out that the Huns, by design, have to put more effort into defence than other civs - but that's not forcing you to play them aggressively, precisely because you can defend. While you appear to be arguing that not having a spearman forces the Huns to play aggressively.
Again, no civ's abilities should FORCE you to play a certain way.
Allow me to introduce you to Gandhi... As above, you aren't forced to, you just have different challenges when not doing so - just as if you're not exploiting the Siamese UA, or if you spawn around nothing but mercantile CSes, you have the challenge inherent in essentially not having a UA. This is entirely the point of having multiple civ options, so I'm not sure why you feel it's an issue. Forgoing spearmen in favour of more warriors can be a viable long-term strategy anyway, particularly if you don't plan on playing an aggressive early game where you wouldn't get a lot of use out of pikes and would rather have more units that upgrade into infantry later in the game, but also if you choose to rush Steel.
you arent giving up early defense, you have horse archers to flank the rear units, skirt past the enemy carpet to pillage, and paired up with scouts, a 3-man team of 2 horse archers + scout and a 3 man team of 2 scout + horse archer can do a lot even against swordsman and longswordsman.
None of that is really defensive. The trouble is, Civ battles are rarely won or lost in the open field - most take place around cities, where avenues of attack are constrained and rough terrain (with well-placed cities) makes it difficult to focus fire from multiple units. Pillaging certainly isn't defensive. If you can head off an attacking force before it gets close to your city you might be able to damage it enough that it's no longer a threat, but otherwise HAs won't be a great help, and they die very readily to spears the AI likes to use (and especially to horsemen, but the AI uses them much less). As ranged rather than cavalry units they don't even have any particular advantage against enemy siege.
Did you do that with just one ram?
I thought it would be harder since the ram is awful at defending itself
The AI is awful at defending itself too. Pit Attila against a player and this doesn't happen. In my game as Attila (actually multiplayer, but everyone on my continent was an AI) there was an American spearman in position to attack my Ram that just stood there while I demolished the capital.
Though even so it will usually take two rams to do this job, simply because that's one less turn per city and that means more time to move onto the next before defenders start popping out in unmanageable numbers.
Just read your post 10 minutes ago, started a small pangaea emperor map to try this out. Powerful civ? Ya.
