Talk:Italians/@comment-25974143-20150120090634/@comment-24444169-20150120102702

As stated before, the Italians are meant to be a supporting civilisation, and is almost obviously meant to be used in multiplayer, considering one of its units is shared with the other allies.

That said, one must keep in mind that they are an economic civ. and therefore should be trading via land and water too when possible, any time. Their economic advantages are great and allow the player to easily mass bombards.

I personally used to dislike them, and considered them a futile civilisation, but that's because I had experience with predominantly aggressive civilisations, or with a great emphasys on some of their units nonetheless. (e.g. while the Teutons are a defensive civilisation, their core army supposedly made of paladins and teut. knights is very powerful and high tier). Combine the genoese with your hand cann. and a few pikes/champs to ward off the missile infantry, and see if they are actually the weakest.

Lastly, I agree with you that they still lack many military upgrades and that they could have had some small stat boosting bonus for any class of unit. They have a very pointless cavalry which is even inaccurate as knights played an important role in medieval warfare of Northern Italy especially during the events of the Lombard League.