I do apologize then, but
I've had situations where they are game changers, and situations where they just aren't doing much.
And even in game changers, you need to bring in four or five to go rolling. And as stated, you need to bring in infantry screens to smash whatever units are left from your barrages.
And guess what? You still lose a ton of units to whatever the AI dishes out (on Immortal, a
ton), and the only reason I managed to make that much headway in that game above was because 1) constraining terrain 2) I brought that many Riflemen and was bringing in more 3) Carthaginians can cross that mountain 4) Songhai was
slightly below me in tech (really bad game).
So I'm not seeing how overpowered is overpowered, unless by definition of overpowered you mean "Pyrrhic victory"