You misunderstand me or ethiopia. I am not talking about the UA - the 20% combat bonus which applies to all units when the opposing civ has more cities than you - which by the way, applies both within and without your own borders. I am talking specifically about the UU, the mehal safari, which grants a combat bonus when fighting near the capital city. However, as others have previously noticed, this bonus becomes a penalty when you have gone a certain number of hexes away from your capital. People have experienced such situations as having their Mehal Safari (a rifleman replacement) losing against damaged barbarian warriors on the other side of the world. As most have hypothesised, this is a simple coding error and while the bonus for fighting near the capital should drop off as you move away from the capital, it should eventually reach baseline, the standard fighting strength for a rifleman, it should never begin decreasing your combat strength, which of course seriously hampers Ethiopia for any late game wars of aggression, or even for defense of a large empire with colonies/cities far from the capital. It leaves you basically without any sort of solid rifleman unit and worse, the 'bonus' carries over on upgrades, meaning that you need to fresh build the next tier of unit if you want to avoid carrying over this same unfortunate 'bonus'.