According to the Manual:
The Camel Archer requires Guilds, Horseback Riding, and Archery. It's advantages over the Knight is that Camel Archers don't require any resources and they receive a 25% chance to withdraw from combat. Sounds alright to me. I'd like to have them over a knight.
ok. Since, no one has corrected this yet for BTS. I will.
In Civ4 vanilla, the Camel Archer was like you have stated.
In BTS, the Camel Archer only has a 15% withrawl rate.
To me, the CA is of marginal benefit over the standard Knight. As many have stated in other posts in the forum too, Knight rushes in general, just ar not done too much, because the techs are off the main path to Liberalism. So, CA rushes would be too, in most cases.
I did find one exemption to this rule.
I created a custom game starting at Renaissance Era.
At that point, one starts the game with 2 settlers, 2 LB, 1 worker and 1 Explorer.
Since, no resourses have been hooked up yet, and none are needed for the CA, then one can chop out a few and conquer a close AI before they build Castles. However, since most of us start on Ancient Era, this situation rarely comes up.
The discussion turned to leaders. I too am not found of Saladin. His traits don't seem to mesh well with his UU or UB. If he was Lincoln [CHR/PHI], then his CA would gain xp faster and his early specialists would gain great people faster during the pre-caste system time period, to make the UB more beneficial.
Some could argue for Pericles [CRE/PHI] or Louis [CRE/IND] too, espicially for cultural victories.
So, there are better leader traits that can benefit the empire, than what was provided.
In mods that add some of the ancient middle eastern structures as wonders, such as Petra, Gobekli Tepe and others, then one could possibly consider an unnamed [IND/PHI] leader mentioned in another thread to further improve the options available to Arabia.
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