Editing Total War Warhammer/Tactics/Grand Cathay (section)

===Missiles===
*'''Peasant Archers''': Like your peasant infantry, but with a bow and arrow. Cheap and expendable, potentially valuable if you need a relatively disposable unit to provide a small amount of ranged support and trigger the harmony buff where needed. Has no AP, but that shouldn't be a problem in campaign where the majority of your chaos, norsca, and ogre enemies don't have much armor. Becomes obsolete for your main armies fairly quickly since you can get jade crossbowmen very early, but they make good emergency fodder since they can be recruited pretty much anywhere.
** Very cost effective, especially with the harmony buffs. Can put down a significant amount of fire with their reload skill buffs.
**'''Bandits of the Silver Road''': Archers with Stalk, Vanguard Deployment, and a Shield, making them a better skirmisher focused unit that can trade with lower tier skirmishers. Their big selling point is that they have fire arrows and their shots imbue fire weakness, so now you have a cost effective unit that can trade cost effectively against units weak to fire. The fire weakness can also synergize with the Fire Rain Rocket and a Yang caster, allowing them to act as spotters for you artillery and magic.

*'''Jade Warrior Crossbowmen''': Jade Warriors with crossbows (in case you couldn't have told from their name). Armoured and with a shielded variant, they sit in-between Empire Crossbowmen and Dwarf Quarrelers in terms of durability and power; they still have the same "hunker-down" ability as regular JW, so you'll probably want to move them in position behind Long Spears and refrain from moving them to keep those bonuses. Similar to jade warriors they have a lot of tech and ancillary buffs so remain useful all game long, eventually you'll consider switching these for celestial crossbows or crane gunners, at least for your more elite armies, defensive armies can probably stick with these. Harmony gives them very impressive reload speed.

*'''Jade Warrior Crossbowmen With shields''' You know the drill by now. silver shield and a plus 8 to melee defense. They are basically more expensive Dwarf Quarrelers with better unit sizes and better reload with harmony.
**They have become substantially more important in the Campaign after the WoC and Chorf updates: the shields let them tank Horror fire and Hobgoblin spam, at the cost of being more expensive and a slightly worse Global Recruitment than the non-shielded variant.
*'''Celestial Dragon Guard Crossbowmen''': Jade Warriors on steroids, once again. Shielded, heavily armoured and with armour-piercing bolts, they're durable archers that can trade shots with the enemy's best. Definitely a better upgrade to jade crossbows than regular dragon guard are to jade halberds, but remember that ap doesn't matter if your fighting most demons.
**On paper, their bolts have more strength than the Sisters of Avelorn, but it's mundane AP versus the Fire/Magic combo that lets the Sisters put in work against pretty much anything. Celestial Crossbowmen have better DPS when buffed, though.
**Desperate and in a pinch? Castle too tight for shooting? Well, they're still Celestial Guard, and so are decent in melee, minus the AP or anti-large bonus. They still give Harmony when in melee. As a pure ranged unit they do face competition from crane gunners who have much better range, but these can actually hold the line and tank some damage, plus the benefits of indirect fire. Generally a core of these with 2 crane gunners is a good mix for example, have the crane gunners snipe lords and high priority cav or fast targets, while these handle the infantry and slower enemies.

* '''Iron Hail Gunners''': A living version of the Zombie Handcannons from the Pirate coast, these ladies massacre armored infantry with their high-AP shotguns. With the Harmony system, being able to keep them closer to your melee units will make them into machinegunning shotgunners. Can fire in melee if the enemy makes contact without breaking through the first rank.
**Unlike your Crossbowmen or Crane gunners, they lack shields or armor, but are much more mobile. You can flank with them to outright delete elite infantry, but even having them shoot through gaps in your formation is also helpful, because they're Cathayan shotguns. Keep in mind they do worse than jade crossbowman in auto-resolve. lack of indirect fire is an issue so learn to use chevron formations. Replace these with crane gunners as soon as you can however. Frankly given that all your early game enemies tend to have poor armor in campaign, you should probably just use Jade warrior crossbows instead.
**Considering how quickly you can get these ladies in the Campaign, they're instrumental damage dealers from early to mid.
** Be cautious about using them against the ogres because they will literally just run through your front line, because hurr durr pull through. In campaign, best employed against all chaos factions other than Tzeentch, whose basic units will fucking slaughter the gunners with their ranged attacks, because fuck you I guess.

* '''Crane Gunners''': Human Skaven Jezzails. Much like their rat counterparts, these gunners excel at long-ranged sniping with their second-only-to-artillery range and will likely form a core part of your backline while you make the enemy come to you. They come with shields, which should give them some missile resistance to weather counter-fire and kill those jezzails. You're probably better off going for grand cannons in most match ups though. Grand cannons have better all around combat stats and the exact same movement speed; but with Patch 1.2, they are now shieldbreakers (reducing Missile Block Chance) and their missiles gain limited piercing, which makes them good at mowing down closely ranked. Better than cannons at sniping mobile targets and they can take cover + shoot out of forests when cannons can't. 1-2 of these in an army is a great way to snipe down high priority targets.